{"id":1932,"date":"2012-01-07T02:54:35","date_gmt":"2012-01-07T07:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=1932"},"modified":"2012-01-07T02:54:35","modified_gmt":"2012-01-07T07:54:35","slug":"research-works-act-latest-congressional-lie-about-helping-small-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/research-works-act-latest-congressional-lie-about-helping-small-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Research Works Act: Latest Congressional Lie about Helping Small Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am pissed.<\/em><\/p>\n

As a small business owner, I am feeling very, very disappointed that there is certainly some law out there that would impose penalties if I drove on over to Riverside County and bitch-slapped Darrell Issa. I’ve grown cynical enough in my old age and after having run a small business since 1985 that I am used to every politician under the sun spouting “Think of small business!” as a knee-jerk reaction to anything, whether their position is for it or against it. Usually, they are easy enough to ignore. Payroll taxes are not going to decide whether or not I hire people – business demand is. Health care – we’ve made that an option for our employees long before it was required by law.<\/p>\n

This time, though, they are REALLY pissing me off. Let me tell you what the Research Works Act is and how it really does hurt my small business. As this succinct article by Janet Stemwedel on the Scientific American blog site explains<\/a> well, not only does it require the American taxpayer (that’s me!) to pay twice for the same research, but also, the very people being protected and profiting are NOT those who produce the work to begin with.<\/p>\n

Right now, if a person is funded by federal funds, say, the National Institutes of Health, they are required to submit the results of their research to PubMed’s repository within twelve months of publication. The idea is that if the public paid for this research then the public has the right to read it. Sounds fair, right?<\/p>\n

In case you don’t know, rarely do authors get paid by journals.\u00a0 I’ve published articles in the American Journal on Mental Retardation, Research in Developmental Disabilities, Educational and Psychological Measurement – to name a few. I’ve been a peer reviewer for Family Relations. For none of this did I get paid. That was fine. Almost all of the research I did was funded by federal funds and part of the grant proposals included dissemination – that is, publication of scientific articles. Fair enough. As a peer reviewer, I’m just repaying the service others have done in reviewing my work. Again, no problem.<\/p>\n

Yet, in many cases, if I need a journal article for a grant or report I’m writing for a client, it is going to cost me $30 per article.\u00a0 Contract research is a good bit of where the actual money comes into this company (you didn’t seriously think I made my living by drinking Chardonnay, spouting wanton programming advice and snarky comments, did you?)<\/p>\n

The journal did not pay for the research to be conducted – the federal government did. The journal did not pay the author – the federal government did. The journal did not pay the reviewer – they volunteer.<\/p>\n

SO WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I PAY $30 AN ARTICLE?<\/p>\n

I just pulled up a random small project I had done recently for a client and there were seven articles in there that I would be charged $210 to have used. As I said, this was a small project, and I calculated it would have brought the price up 7.5%<\/p>\n

Not long ago, there was a huge outcry about the city of Santa Monica adding a ten cent cost for a paper bag and banning plastic bags<\/a>. “It will hurt small business!” people cried. Actually, I have always made a major effort to shop at our local businesses, I still do and it has not hurt any business anywhere that I can tell. You know what else I can tell you? That increasing the cost of a $3,000 project to $3,210 is a hell of a lot more significant than paying ten cents for a paper bag!<\/p>\n

So what exactly is this bill doing? It is moving money from small businesses, like me,\u00a0 and like my buddy, Dr. Jacob Flores, who runs Mobile Medicine Outreach<\/a> and into the hands of large publishing companies, who not coincidentally gave a huge amount of money\u00a0 to Democratic congresswoman Carolyn Maloney of New York. I’d like to bitch-slap her, too, but being on the opposite side of the country, it would be a lot less convenient for me.<\/p>\n

You can read more detail in this article from the Atlantic<\/a>, where Rebecca Rosen asks, “Why Is Open-Internet Champion Darrell Issa Supporting an Attack on Open Science? ”<\/p>\n

As Danah Boyd points out on her blog<\/a>, there is this new thing for sharing knowledge now, called the Internet and a major point of the Research Works Act seems to be to prevent it being used to share knowledge that I paid for with the approximately 50%\u00a0 of my income (yeah 38% federal, 10% state) that I pay in taxes. And you know what, being a graduate from that great institution, the University of California, that enables me to make the money to pay these taxes, I don’t object to that.<\/p>\n

What I DO object to is paying again for the same resources I already paid for once just because some lobbyists for large corporations lined Issa’s and Maloney’s pockets.<\/p>\n

While it may not be legal for me to bitch-slap Issa it is certainly legal for me to go to the next California event where that lying-ass mother has the balls to stand up and claim to be helping California small business. Anyone who knows the next public event where he’ll be speaking, please hit me up.<\/p>\n

One thing, though, I don’t think I’ll be going to any of his fundraisers. I think he’s gotten quite enough money from the publishing industry.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am pissed. As a small business owner, I am feeling very, very disappointed that there is certainly some law out there that would impose penalties if I drove on over to Riverside County and bitch-slapped Darrell Issa. I’ve grown cynical enough in my old age and after having run a small business since 1985…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,15,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-de-mars-general-life-ramblings","category-open-data","category-the-julia-group"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1932"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1939,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1932\/revisions\/1939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}