A bill designed to make scientific research funded by the US government's 11 largest funding bodies accessible for free by the general public is hibernating in the US legislature, awaiting some resolution in the heated health care reform debate before it can be seriously discussed by lawmakers.
Congressional staffers in the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) of 2009 (S.1373) lingers, have been forced to shift their attentions to health care and away from the bill. "They're definitely swamped," Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, told The Scientist. Joseph added that movement on FRPAA is not expected "until after health care gets sorted out." ...
Joseph added that a companion FRPAA bill is "under active consideration" in the House of Representatives, another indication that lawmakers are taking the relatively smooth adoption of the NIH open access mandate as a sign that the dire predictions of widespread subscription cancellations may have been unfounded. ...
Predictably, though, not everyone is so excited about FRPAA. "My hope is that [FRPAA] doesn't go anywhere," Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, told The Scientist. Frank called FRPAA a "problematic piece of legislation," saying that its six month embargo period for submission to an open access repository may lead to scores of librarians cancelling valuable institutional subscriptions to scientific journals. ...
Joseph and Shulenburger both said that there's no empirical support for such claims. "We have no data that shows that any publishers have been hurt by the NIH policy," Joseph said. ...
But Frank cites information that he says indicates there is harm to be done in mandating that manuscripts are made open access six months after publication (and not 12 months after publication as the NIH policy states). "There has been some survey work of librarians that has indicated that they would be more inclined to cancel a subscription if the content were available six months after publication compared to 12 months after publication." Frank could not furnish that reference, however, when requested by The Scientist. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 10/08/2009 11:46:00 AM.
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.
