U. condemns bill limiting public research access - The Brown Daily Herald - Serving the community daily since 1891

An article from the Brown Daily Herald states that Brown University: “has publicly condemned a bill that would require publishers to approve open access to government-funded research... The Research Works Act would require consent from subscription-based journals before studies they have published could be made publicly available. The University condemned the legislation for ‘a whole variety of reasons,’ said Provost Mark Schlissel P'15. He cited the limitations it could impose on community access to student and faculty research as the most troubling part of the proposal. ‘It's a bill that would benefit for-profit publishers at the expense of the scholarly community and the public by imposing an increased barrier to access to the product of our research,’ Schlissel said. Faculty members are not currently required to publish their research in open journals, Schlissel said. If the bill passed, members of the University community who did not subscribe to particular journals would have difficulty accessing the studies published both at Brown and at other institutions. Schlissel, whose own research in the biological sciences is funded by NIH grants, said it would be ‘disappointing’ if someone had to subscribe to a journal to read his findings. ‘It's a matter of public policy,’ he said. ‘As a country, we'd like to lower the barriers to the access to research.’ The University is currently considering a policy that would make all research done at Brown freely accessible to the public, The Herald reported last October...”