Forgive me for not understanding what's going on here: according to News.com, the Department of Energy has shut down PubSCIENCE, a searchable database of over 2 million documents on energy-related research. The reason? PubSCIENCE's (free) contents overlapped with the database contents of private companies, and so--naturally--because private interests were threatened, the public's interest in freely accessible research must be constrained.
What makes things worse is that 80-90 percent of energy research in the private sector is funded by taxpayer dollars. So it's not as though the government were really seizing other people's labor.
And the other thing I don't get: it's not as though PubSCIENCE required private companies or journals to make their research publicly available (though that wouldn't be such a bad idea, given where the money comes from). Instead, as far as I know, PubSCIENCE was just a database of abstracts and other bibliographic data--it was still entirely up to publishers to decide whether a given article would be freely available. How is a unified database of bibliographic data bad for anybody? (Except, of course, for private database companies.)
I think it's worth dwelling on the words of then-Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson upon the inauguration of PubSCIENCE in 1999: "For science to rapidly advance at the frontiers, it must be open. And shared knowledge is the enabler of scientific progress." (See article.) Amazing, how far we have progressed.
Read the News.com article here.