Schroer: The Cost of Knowledge
Dartmouth is counted among the best universities in the world, so why is it failing to lead on one of the world’s most pressing issues? Most of our research — and most research in America — is published behind immense paywalls that keep the American public and students and scholars in developing nations from accessing the information they need. Preventive vaccines for the Ebola virus in primates were developed 14 years ago and published in Nature, an international science journal, behind a $32 access fee. Had this information been readily available to the general public after its date of publication, a human vaccine could have potentially been researched and tested prior to 2014’s Ebola crisis. The open access movement believes that if knowledge is power, then timely access to information is an issue of global justice.