How nice, Maryanne!

Too bad Conyers has his head up his backside about some issues that will make a difference in health care and research. He was promoting a bill that would remove the requirement that publicly funded research be made public immediately or after a very short publication period.

Lawrence Lessig is an attorney who is a proponent of Open Access and copyright issues. It's a battle with for-profit publishers who are gouging the very institutions that produce the high quality scholarly articles that they're publishing. Scholars haven't known better and have given away all of their rights to their own work. The NIH is one of the big agencies that has said "if you take our public funding you have to make sure that your published works are freely available." Conyers, who takes large campaign donations from those for-profit publishers, wanted to not only take that access clause out of the NIH funding, he wanted to put back all of the gouging options that the publishers have enjoyed for many years.

Obama signed that Omnibus bill yesterday and included in it was wording that made the Open Access part law that Conyers can't touch. This is really important in the access to, the use of, and the continuation of medical research.

Yesss!

Okay, off my soap box. I didn't explain it clearly, it takes some time to do so. But it was an important battle that Obama won.

I've won a little battle of sorts also. Today in the mail (didn't have to wait two weeks!) was the IRS letter telling me that they wanted a copy of one more form. They enclosed a blank form and said I had 20 days to return it. Heck, it only took 20 minutes. I dropped that puppy in the mail on my way out to pick up my son after school. It could still take a while to process it, but I hope by sending it back so quickly I'm still ahead of the tax rush in early April.

SRS