1 Percent Versus the 99 Percent–A Case for Open Access

Vilay Khandelwal | Scientific American | December 9, 2011

....Usually, I work at my University where scientific articles are freely available. I faintly remember the orientation session when the university boasted of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to provide free access to these expensive journals. I can see why this was a selling point for graduate students. Today, this one article is cutting a $32 hole in my poor grad student pocket.

But wait a second. This does not make sense. Why can I, a taxpayer, not have free access to the research I helped fund at every stage of the scientific process? How did the fruits of our investments become the properties of the corporations?..