Librarians, Open Access Advocates ‘Vehemently Oppose’ Research Works Act

Connotea Imports 2012-07-31

Summary:

“A bill introduced December 16 in the House of Representatives has exacerbated tensions between open access advocates and the scholarly publishing industry over the dissemination of  publicly funded scientific and medical research. The Research Works Act (H.R.3699)... has had, nevertheless, the effect of a 3 a.m. tocsin on librarians and other open access champions who wish to raze paywalls that enclose taxpayer-funded, peer-reviewed research. The American Library Association said today that it ‘vehemently opposes the bill.’ ‘Essentially, the bill seeks to prohibit federal agencies from conditioning their grants to require that articles reporting on publicly funded research be made accessible to the public online,’ wrote Heather Joseph, the executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), which is a creature of the Association of Research Libraries. ‘If this legislation goes through it would be a major blow to open access to scholarly research and publishing,” wrote Maura Smale on the Association of College and Research Libraries blog. The proposed bill, if it were to pass, would roll back the National Institute of Health’s Public Access Policy, which was introduced in 2008 and which makes NIH-funded research publicly available within 12 months via PubMed Central... H.R. 3699 would not permit the dissemination of such work without the permission of the author and the publisher. Although the measure refers to ‘private-sector research work,’ it defines that work as ‘research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing...’ Peter Suber, a prominent advocate for open access to research, has been maintaining a Google+ thread on the legislation. He wrote there: ‘Under the NIH policy, authors give permission for OA when they are still the copyright holders. Even when they later transfer some rights to publishers, they retain the right to authorize OA. Hence, OA through NIH is authorized by the copyright holder, in this case by the author. But RWA Section 2.1 requires publisher consent for that OA. It requires the consent of an additional party, when the relevant rightsholder has already consented. A consent which suffices under current copyright law will no longer suffice under RWA. Either that will violate US copyright law or amend it pro tanto...’ The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has backed the measure, saying it ‘will prohibit federal agencies from unauthorized free public dissemination of journal articles that report on research which, to some degree, has been federally-funded but is produced and published by private sector publishers receiving no such funding.’ AAP’s support for the measure has led to calls for scholarly societies and university presses to disassociate themselves from the organization... Tom Reller, the vice president and head of global corporate relations at Elsevier, expressed support for the measure... Similarly, Rep. Issa told The Atlantic magazine that ‘The bill has been introduced to ensure that the intellectual property rights of commercial and non-profit journal publishers are not violated by government regulators disseminating their privately owned articles for free...’”

Link:

http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2012/01/publishing/librarians-open-access-advocates-vehemently-oppose-research-works-act/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » Connotea Imports
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

ru.no oa.new oa.comment oa.usa oa.legislation oa.negative oa.rwa oa.nih oa.copyright oa.librarians oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.advocacy oa.elsevier oa.libraries oa.sparc oa.aap oa.ala oa.acrl

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

07/31/2012, 11:53

Date published:

02/17/2012, 17:35