Those groups, along with many members of Congress, want to make the published results of federally financed medical research freely available to the public whose taxes funded the work — results that today are typically available only to journal subscribers or to people willing to pay expensive per-page fees.

The publishing association, which includes among its members some of the world’s biggest and most profitable scientific journals, has argued that free Internet access to the publicly funded portion of their contents would undermine their subscription bases. Lacking that income, they claim, they would not be able to do the invisible, unsung but important, work of screening out bad science and publishing and archiving the very best.