Why Is Open-Internet Champion Darrell Issa Supporting an Attack on Open Science? - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology - The Atlantic

"Congressman Darrell Issa has received a lot of positive press for his criticism of SOPA, the anti-piracy bill that has provoked an outpouring of anger across the web. And rightly so -- Issa has been one of the key voices in calling highlighting SOPA's dangers and offering, with Senator Ron Wyden, an alternative piece of legislation called OPEN. Moreover, Issa has pushed initiatives such as "Project Madison," a platform for crowdsourcing legislation and an interactive livestream for the committee he chairs. And, to top things off, his website devotes its top spot to his Open initiative, proclaiming, "First, Americans have a right benefit from what they've created. And second, Americans have a right to an open internet." ...All of this makes his support for a new bill, the Research Works Act, incomprehensible. That bill would prohibit all federal agencies from putting any privately published articles into an online database, even -- and this is the kicker -- those articles based on research funded by the public if they have received "any value-added contribution, including peer review or editing" from a private publisher. This is a direct attack on the National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central, the massive free online repository of articles resulting from research funded with NIH dollars....In response to our request for comment, his office provided us with a statement saying, "Publicly funded research is and must continue to be absolutely available to the public. We must also protect the value added to publicly funded research by the private sector and ensure that there is still an active commercial and non-profit research community. 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." Congressman Issa wants to have it both ways -- make the research available *and* protect private publishers -- but this bill only furthers one of those goals, and it's the latter...."