"John Conyers (D-MI) apparently has a problem with this. He is pushing a bill through Congress that will literally ban the open access of these papers, forcing scientists to only publish in journals. This may not sound like a big deal, but journals are very expensive."
Who would have foreseen that academic journals had such lobbying power? I am disgusted.
Many universities are following MIT OCW's great example and making their lectures and course materials available online for free. Only a spineless, corrupt politician would try to go the other direction.
If I remember the numbers correctly, he is getting about 4x the contributions from the academic publishing industry that non-supporters do. Anyway, all of these sums are pretty trivial.
My roomate's uncle threw around something like $40,000 in the Capitol and got a several million dollar award to do some preposterously high margin "aid work."
I expect our government to be for sale. I am pretty upset it is so cheap.
One idea I like is to pay members of congress a ton (like $3M/yr) and then execute them if they do anything wrong. Or something like that. That's like $2B/yr in salaries but would probably save $500B-$1T/yr in graft.
Who would have foreseen that academic journals had such lobbying power? I am disgusted.
Many universities are following MIT OCW's great example and making their lectures and course materials available online for free. Only a spineless, corrupt politician would try to go the other direction.