Internet Rejoices: SOPA Is at Death's Door - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology - The Atlantic

"[P]erhaps the best example of that drive to clamp down on the free exchange online is another bill lurking in the house: the Research Works Act, a bill opponents are calling #SOPAv2, which has flown mostly under the radar while SOPA nabbed headlines. Cosponsored by Darrell Issa -- the same Darrell Issa who opposes SOPA -- the act would make open access to taxpayer-funded research a prerogative not of the authors but of publishers. (Could it possibly be because of the major financial support Representative Issa has received from the pharmaceutical industry?) As Mike Taylor wrote in The Guardian yesterday, "This is the moment academic publishers gave up all pretence of being on the side of scientists. Their rhetoric has traditionally been of partnering with scientists, but the truth is that for some time now scientific publishers have been anti-science and anti-publication. The Research Works Act, introduced in the US Congress on 16 December, amounts to a declaration of war by the publishers." The Research Works Act won't inspire the kind of ire SOPA has. Wikipedia will not go dark in protest; more than 25,000 people will not add a "Stop RWA" banner to their Twitter avatars, as they have done for SOPA. But it would be a shame if, lost amid the celebrations of SOPA's death, the RWA stealthily slipped through...."