Is Conyers shilling for publishers?

Larry Lessig, a legal scholar and the founder of Change Congress, and Michael Eisen, a prominent professor of genetics, have a scathing article at the Huffington Post accusing Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) of selling out the public to the interests of private publishers of scientific journals. Writing about a law introduced by Conyers, they state:

Right now, there’s a proposal in Congress to forbid the government from requiring scientists who receive taxpayer funds for medical research to publish their findings openly on the Internet.

This ban on “open access publishing” (which is currently required) would result in a lot of government-funded research being published exclusively in for-profit journals — inaccessible to the general public.

If the research is funded with taxpayer money, why should taxpayers have to pay for journal access in order to see the results? Good question. Lessig and Eisen point to this report by MAPLight, an organization that highlights the influence of money in Congress, that suggests that Conyers is doing the bidding of publishers in order to preserve their profits. The report shows that those members of the House Judiciary Committee who are co-sponsoring the bill, including Conyers, received twice as much in donations from the publishing industry than those on the committee who are not sponsoring the bill.

It should be noted, however, that the numbers here are not large. Among the sponsors of the bill, Conyers received the most money of all and the total is only $9,000. But three members of the committee who are not sponsors of the bill received more than Conyers from the same industry. And the comparative numbers are skewed by the fact that nearly half the non-sponsors on the committee received no contributions at all from publishers.

I don’t think the numbers in the MAPLight report support Lessig and Eisen’s contention that the bill is a “money-for-influence scheme.” But I do agree with them that the bill is very bad idea and that Conyers should be ashamed of trying to prevent the publication of scientific data that was paid for by the public in a forum the public can access.