Funding research

One little-noticed provision stuck inside the massive spending bill Congress sent to the president last week will actually benefit taxpayers.

That provision will ensure that taxpayers have access to information about the medical research they fund. Scientists getting grant money will now have to submit a final copy of their research papers to a federal database when they are accepted for publication. That database will be available to the public.

Previously, the only way somebody could analyze what a scientist had done with his grant money was to pick up a copy of the obscure journal in which his work was published.

This reform was a long time in coming, due to opposition from the publishers of scientific journals, who believe it could hurt their business. They vowed to keep fighting. “It’s not as simple as some have made this out to be,” said Allan Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs at the Association of American Publishers.

Actually, Mr. Adler, it is.

The taxpayers fund the research. Scientists who accept federal grant money have an obligation to those who pay for it. If you don’t want your work made easily accessible to your benefactors, then don’t take their money.

It’s that simple.

“The basic reason we went to bat so hard for this was because we thought it was the right thing to do with taxpayers’ science,” said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. “Now there will be $29 billion in taxpayer investments freely available to the public.”

We’ll save arguments about private vs. public funding of medical research for another day. But most people should certainly agree that taxpayers have a right to examine what they pay for, should they so choose.