Steal This Research Paper!

…He and Brown realized that it would be immensely helpful to cross-reference their data against the existing scientific literature. Conveniently, the Stanford library had recently launched HighWire Press, the first digital repository for journal articles. “We marched down there and told them what we wanted to do, and could we have these papers,” Eisen recalls. “It didn’t occur to me that they might say no. It just seemed such an obvious good. I remember coming back from that meeting and being like, ‘What a bunch of fuckin’ dicks! Why can’t we have this stuff?’”

The lab’s gene-chip battle, Eisen says, had “inspired a similar attitude with what ultimately became PLOS: ‘This is so ridiculous. We can kill it!’” Brown, luckily, had friends in high places. Harold Varmus, his own postdoctoral mentor, was then in charge of the NIH—one of the most powerful jobs in science. The NIH doles out more than $20 billion annually for cutting-edge biomedical research. Why, Brown asked Varmus, shouldn’t the results be available to everyone?

Artikel auf Mother Jones

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