Here's the beginning of and a link to an article that may be of interest (from Sigma Xi's Science-in-the-News mailing list):
A FIGHT FOR FREE ACCESS TO MEDICAL RESEARCH from The Washington Post The family was poor, living on the Great Plains, and the child had a rare medical condition. "Here's what we can do," the family doctor told them. But it didn't work, recalled Michael Keller, who oversees the libraries at Stanford University. "So the family went to the Internet." Soon they were back at the doctor's office with a report of a new therapy. "They plunked it down and said, 'Hey, can we try this?' And guess what? It worked." Such tales are becoming increasingly common, but the happy endings come at a cost -- literally. That is because the vast majority of the 50,000 to 60,000 research articles published each year as a result of federally funded science ends up in the hands of for-profit publishers -- the largest of them based overseas -- that charge as much as $50 to view the results of a single study online. The child's parents, Keller said, paid for several papers before finding the one that led them to the cure. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19104-2003Aug4.html> ============================================ Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/ ============================================