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>
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Thomas J. Walker
Department of Entomology & Nematology
PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive)
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
E-mail: tjw_at_ufl.edu (or tjwalker_at_ifas.ufl.edu)
FAX: (352)392-0190
Web:
http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
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Received on Tue Aug 05 2003 - 17:27:19 BST