Here are some more comments from the press and blogosphere on the re-introduction of the Conyers bill (a.k.a. Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, HR 801), which would overturn the OA policy at the NIH. Also see our past collections (1, 2).
For all of you who believe you have the right to the information that your tax dollars are paying for, please write to your representative....I’ve written to my representative (again…although a different one this go-around).
I can’t believe we’ve had to revisit this topic. Come on already. Life’s too short.
This is not nearly as big or headline-worthy as the colossal banking bailout, but the spirit is the same: Use taxpayer money to save a private industry from its own failings. The big STM publishers are clinging to a dying business model, and nothing Congress does will save them if they don’t get with the program and stop fearing the giant copy machine that is the Internet....
Last year, Congress finally got fed up with the fact that publicly funded research was being locked up in various scientific journals. The whole journal business is something of a scam. Unlike other publications, the folks who write the papers for journals pay the journals to get their content published. On top of that, the "peers" who review the works aren't paid for their work either. In other words, these journals get a ton of free labor... and sometimes that labor pays them. And, then, on top of that, they charge ridiculously high prices for anyone to subscribe, claim the copyright on all submitted works, and are incredibly aggressive in enforcing that copyright. An academic I knew, at one point had to consider doing an experiment a second time just to get the same results, because mentioning the earlier results of his own study might violate the copyright of the journal. And, remember, much of this is happening with research that was funded by taxpayers.
So, Congress decided that any research that was funded by NIH (which funds about $30 billion in research each year) had to also be openly published one-year after it was published in the journal. It's hard to see how this damages the journals at all. They still retain a significant monopoly right on the works -- and have a year's head start. Yet, the journal publishers have been screaming bloody murder, and even trying to force academics to pay thousands of dollars to cover the "cost" of republishing the article in an open archiving database.
And, of course, those publishers have been complaining like crazy to Congress. Last year, Rep. Conyers (who also recently introduced the RIAA's preferred legislation, and was heavily backed by the American Intellectual Property Law Association in his most recent election) introduced some legislation to repeal this requirement, though the legislation went nowhere fast. However, he's wasted very little time introducing identical legislation this year.
... Public Knowledge and The Alliance for Taxpayer Access are both asking people to write their elected representatives to oppose this attempt to once again lock up the very research that we all funded as taxpayers.
...In response to the bill, the American Library Association (ALA) joined the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalitions (SPARC) and several other national and regional library and advocacy organization to send a letter to the members of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee expressing our long-standing and strong support for the NIH Open Access Policy. In addition, the letter addressed the misconception that the policy affects the rights of authors, specifically copyright. Included, as an attachment to the letter, was the SPARC-sponsored analysis that outlines why the NIH Public Access policy does not affect copyright law.
As champions for open access, we are indeed experiencing déjà vu over the reintroduction of a bill that seeks to amend copyright code and create a new category of copyrighted work. And as soon the economic stimulus bill is finalized, we’ll focus our attention to advocating against this egregious bill....
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
