The Economist: The findings of medical research are disseminated too slowly
“On January 1st the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation did something that may help to change the practice of science. It brought into force a policy, foreshadowed two years earlier, that research it supports (it is the world’s biggest source of charitable money for scientific endeavors, to the tune of some $4bn a year) must, when published, be freely available to all. On March 23rd it followed this up by announcing that it will pay the cost of putting such research in one particular repository of freely available papers. … One criticism, in a world where most non-commercial scientific research is sponsored by governments, is that there should be no further charge for reading the results of taxpayer-funded work…” (3/25).