Since 2009, publicly funded medical research outputs have been made available free of charge by the National Library of Medicine through PubMed Central. This has provided taxpayers with access to the medical breakthroughs their tax dollars pay for.

But a new bill introduced in the US House of Representatives hopes to switch off this access. The Research Works Act is a publisher-friendly piece of legislation that seeks to choke off open access in favour of keeping publishing profitable.

Michael Eisen, a founder of the Public Library of Science, explains in the New York Times why the Act is bad law.