No Taxation Without Information

It’s almost everyone’s favorite time of the year — tax day. When April 15 rolls around, brace yourself to open your wallet and contribute to the billions of dollars being allocated over on Capitol Hill.

Regardless of the merits of the numerous proposals being debated, everyone should agree that Americans deserve to reap the benefits of their tax dollars. Taxpayer-funded roads should be open to all, defense spending should protect all Americans and public libraries should be exactly that — accessible to all. Since we pay the cost, it’s only fair that we get access to the benefits.

But a new bill introduced by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, is anything but fair. Conyers’ bill seeks to block Americans from freely accessing the fruits of more than $28 billion in scientific research funded annually by the National Institutes of Health. The act would overturn an NIH policy that allows public access to research.

This research, which is funded by taxpayer money, is traditionally published in scholarly journals that can cost tens of thousands of dollars per subscription. Because access to this knowledge is essential to academic research, university libraries spend millions of dollars every year paying for access to these journals.

That cost is passed on to students, meaning that we are paying twice for access to this information. And, given the current economic crisis, those journals will be prohibitively expensive, meaning that taxpayers will not have access to the research they fund. It’s like being forced to pay the toll but not being allowed to drive on the road.

The right way — the fair way — is to continue the NIH open access policy that requires researchers receiving taxpayer money from the NIH to submit a copy of their manuscript to the free, publicly accessible PubMed Central database. By removing the barrier to scholarship, open access allows scholars to advance the frontiers of knowledge and lets ordinary Americans increase their awareness of various medical conditions.

This is not just a hypothetical. Take the story of Josh Sommer, an undergraduate student at Duke University who suffered from a rare form of cancer. Because he had access to Duke’s extensive library system, he was able to research his condition in hundreds of journal articles and ultimately start the Chordoma Foundation to advance research of his disease. The current NIH policy gives millions of other similarly curious and driven minds the ability to do what Sommer did — educate oneself and enact change.

Conyers’ bill seeks to stop that. (The great irony is that when Sommers was a freshman in high school, Conyers asked him to speak at a press conference introducing the U.S. Toxic Mold Safety and Protection Act, a bill designed to prevent the sort of mold poisoning that caused Sommers’ cancer.)

Even scientists are at risk of losing touch with the communal output of their field. Writing to Congress, 33 Nobel laureates said, “Increasingly, scientists and researchers at all but the most well-financed universities are finding it difficult to pay the escalating costs of subscriptions to the journals that provide their lifeblood.”

Access to critical scientific information is vital to confronting the pressing questions of climate change, disease and hundreds of other areas integral to the betterment of the human condition. As members of the Georgetown community, we are dependent upon the unrestricted flow of knowledge. As American citizens we deserve access to the products of our tax dollars. As both concerned students and citizens, we should demand continued open access to taxpayer-funded research.

Kevin Donovan is a sophomore in the School of Foreign Service, founder of Georgetown Students for Free Culture and an information systems consultant for The Hoya.

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