Markham Erickson, Executive Director and General Counsel of NetCoalition, has released NetCoalition's August 12 letter in support of FRPAA. If you're not familiar with NetCoalition,
NetCoalition's members include Amazon.com, Ask.com, Bloomberg, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and Wikipedia, as well as state and local ISPs....
From the rest of the letter:
...It is the mission of NetCoalition companies to help their users locate and access the information they need. FRPAA furthers this mission by placing valuable publicly funded research in an online location where search engines operated by NetCoalition members can index and link to it. FRPAA thus simultaneously assists the broad dissemination of important scientific information and promotes the growth of the Internet.
Some have argued that a public access policy such as FRPAA is inconsistent with copyright law because it requires the involuntary transfer of copyright. This argument threatens to disrupt the fundamental relationship between authors and the entities that pay them for the creation of content. A wide variety of entities, including Internet companies, book and magazine publishers, and marketing departments, pay authors in advance to create works such as articles, novels, and photographs. In exchange for the advance, the author agrees to transfer the copyright to the entity, or to grant the entity a license to use the work.
This system is beneficial to both the author and the entity. The entity receives the content it needs, and the author receives payment while she is creating the content. Because creation of high quality content can take months or even years, this system is particularly important to individual artists or small production companies.
Once the author receives the advance, she must live up to her end of the bargain. She must create the content, and she must transfer the rights she agreed to transfer....If FRPAA constitutes an unlawful involuntary transfer, so does the system of advances relied upon by authors and businesses....
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.
