bjoern.brembs.blog » FIRST: the Research Works Act all over again

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-03-13

Summary:

" ... two Republican representatives introduced the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology (FIRST) Act. According to SPARC: 'This provision would impose significant barriers to the public’s ability to access the results of taxpayer-funded research.  Section 303 of the bill would undercut the ability of federal agencies to effectively implement the widely supported White House Directive on Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research and undermine the successful public access program pioneered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – recently expanded through the FY14 Omnibus Appropriations Act to include the Departments Labor, Education and Health and Human Services.' The two sponsors of the Bill are Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-IN). Not surprisingly, both sponsors are backed up by publisher funding: Lamar Smith receives annual contributions from Elsevier and other publishers. Both sponsors received contributions from a large number of scholarly (primarily medical) associations that also publish their own subscription journals. Some of these contributions were on the order of several tens of thousands of dollars. Among these scholarly societies were ... Of course, nobody knows how much influence their contributions bought these contributors, but this short list already reads like a who’s who of corporate publishers with a track record of lobbying against public access to public research. One cannot exclude that it is a pure coincidence that these two politicians with a track record of publisher contributions are now drafting a publisher-friendly legislation – and thereby doing the public a disservice."

Link:

http://bjoern.brembs.net/2014/03/first-the-research-works-act-all-over-again/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.advocacy oa.first oa.usa oa.government oa.legislation oa.funders oa.green oa.embargoes oa.negative oa.repositories oa.openwashing

Date tagged:

03/13/2014, 10:31

Date published:

03/13/2014, 06:31