We want … no information!

A huge on-line database of “more than 2 million documents on physical sciences and energy-related research,” most of them at least partially funded by tax dollars, and provided for free by the Dept. of Energy? A great resource for the public, right?

Why, then, has it been yanked offline? Security concerns? Lack of interest? Nope. Because other folks want to sell access to the info, and claimed the government was unfairly competing with them.

Proponents of the site’s closure said the move fell into line with a federal law that forbids the government to compete with the private sector in business.
“The Department of Energy carefully reviewed Pubscience in light of existing private-sector products and found that Pubscience substantially duplicated private-sector offerings,” said David LeDuc, public policy director at the Software & Information Industry Association, the chief trade group for the software and digital content industry, which had lobbied for the site’s closure since its inception.

Egad! And I’m forming a mercenary company right now, and plan to sue the US Army for competing unfairly with all of its “taxpayer subsidies” against my “private sector” military.

Launched in 1999, Pubscience contained research materials from more than 1,400 scientific periodicals. Early on, the site was promoted as a benefit to libraries, government researchers, industrial scientists, educators and students. It represented a natural evolution of more than 50 years of work by the DOE’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information to disseminate research, according to the Association of Research Libraries home page.
According to the site, the government subsidizes 80 percent to 90 percent of scientific research and development within the private sector with billions of taxpayer dollars, so it would follow that the site was an extension of that benefit to researchers.

I don’t notice the private documentation companies clamoring to bid on the documents themselves …

Paul Uhlir, director of international scientific and technical information programs at the National Academy of Sciences, said that it’s a loss for the research community because the Pubscience site offered a more comprehensive set of documents than those in the market currently.

Now that these firms will be doing a much better more profitable job than the Feds were, what’s next?

Uhlir added that other government agencies have been targeted by private interest groups to remove data from the Internet. For example, companies that provide weather data to broadcasters and other outfits have sent letters to the National Weather Service and the NOAA asking them to remove certain weather data from their Web sites, he said. In the past, other trade groups have lobbied the National Institute of Health to take down Pubmed central, a medical and health-related research site similar to the science venture.

Y’know, I think I’m going to set up a printing press and make people pay me to print out twenty dollar bills. Then those bloated bureaucrats at the Treasury Dept., with their unfairly-subsidized and outrageously-competitive Bureau of Engraving will have to face the music …