In February, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) reintroduced a proposed piece of legislation, H.R. 801, innocuously titled “The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.” At first glance, it would be easy to dismiss this bill as just another of the myriad copyright and intellectual property-related proposals that are routinely made in Congress, without much punch. However, it’s important for the library community to take a very close look at this particular bill.
H.R. 801 actually packs quite a potential wallop and has widespread implications. It is designed to amend current U.S. copyright law, and carves out a subclass of copyrighted works—specifically, those works that are the result of taxpayer funding—and makes it illegal for the government to require that these works be made freely available to taxpayers as a condition of the federal support researchers receive....
The U.S. government funds research with the expectation that resulting ideas and discoveries will advance science, stimulate the economy, and improve the lives and welfare of members of the public....
A wide range of stakeholder groups—from libraries, universities, and colleges to patient advocates, Nobel Laureates and students—have embraced the NIH policy....
Yet, H.R. 801 would reverse the only U.S. policy currently in place to ensure public access to publicly funded research, and make it impossible for other agencies to enact similar policies. It is supported largely by the publishing lobby, who argue that such a law is needed to protect the value publishers bring to the final articles, specifically during the peer review process. Publishers charge that the NIH policy unfairly “expropriates” the results of this value-added service from them.
However, the publishing lobby’s argument ignores a crucial fact—that the peer review process is a voluntary, unpaid process conducted by researchers, not by publishers. H.R. 801 mistakenly over-values the contribution made by publishers, while ignoring that of researchers, authors, peer-reviewers and taxpayers, all of whom contribute to the process of scholarly publishing without direct remuneration....
If H.R. 801 were to pass, damage would be done not only to the public’s ability to freely access the results of research that their tax dollars helped to fund, but also to our shared interpretation of copyright policy and the peer review process. The results would be detrimental to the libraries, to researchers, to the academy, and to the public as a whole, leaving one to wonder, “The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act: fair to whom?”
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/14/2009 12:16:00 PM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
