A new bill in Congress, H.R. 3699 (“To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector”), creates a regulation that make it hard-to-impossible to publish open access scholarly journals. These are journals that are paid for directly by researchers, who pay a fee that helps pay for peer review, and are then made available free of charge to all comers. They don’t make a profit the way that the incumbent commercial journals do, but they have surpassed many of the old journals for quality and “impact factor” (how often articles are cited in other articles) and are used by scholars and institutions who believe them to be better for contemporary science and scholarship than the 18th-century model of the old commercial journals.

The old lies are the best. The “integrity” argument is as old as the Statute of Anne, and just as fallacious, particularly in a world of global instantaneous review and fact checking.