The scientists seem to consider such thing proprietary despite the fact that their labs, their salaries, their grad student assistants and their little round-the-world junkets are funded by the taxpayer.
And then to top it off the results are hidden behind paywalls.
From TechCrunch:
University Of California Approves Major Open Access Policy To Make Research Free
Good news for fans of the scientific method: the largest and most influential university system on the planet will be giving out its research for free. After 6-year-long fight with the for-profit academic publishing industry, the University of California Senate approved open access standards for research on all 10 campuses.
The policy is major win for those who want to see academic research made public, rather than behind the pricy paywalls of big publishers. Last year, Harvard Library penned a memo urging the university’s 2,100 faculty to boycott for-profit academic research databases and instead submit articles to lower-cost open access journals.
Universities pay millions for access to their colleague’s research, with subscriptions costs up to $40,000 for a single journal. Publishing, too, can cost many times more for more prestigious closed-access journals. Nature reports that it can cost $5,000 to publish in the biology journal, Cell Reports, but only $1,350 for the most popular open-access journal PLoS ONE. “It’s still ludicrous how much it costs to publish research,” said molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, Michael Eisen.
The open access movement has friends in high-places. Recently, in response to a WeThePeople petition, the White House pledged a whopping $100 million to promote open access and to require all federally-funded research to be free of charge....MORE
