Congress should grant taxpayers free access to the medical studies they fund

July 27, 2007

Taxpayers pony up $28 billion annually for the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest source of funding for medical research. The payoff, in addition to the occasional spectacular breakthrough, is more than 60,000 published studies each year.

The first beneficiaries of that knowledge aren’t doctors or patients. They are the publishers of the journals that review, print and sell the results to subscribers. Your tax dollars may have financed the clinical trial of a new treatment regime for the rare disease you’ve contracted, but you’ll probably still have to pay to see the results.

Now, some lawmakers are trying to increase the public’s access to this research. In a new funding bill for the NIH, the House of Representatives required that the results of the studies the government funds must be made freely available online within 12 months of their publication.

Read the rest of the editorial at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-nih27jul27,0,2419093.story?coll=la-opinion-leftrail