Anti-open access bill suffers sudden death

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“Legislation in the US Congress that would have stopped funding agencies stipulating that research they fund with taxpayer dollars be made publicly available has collapsed. The dramatic development could signal a pivotal shift in scientific publishing. The implosion of the Research Works Act on 27 February was sudden and swift. Scientific publishing giant Elsevier - one of the legislation's biggest backers - announced that some of its journal authors, editors and reviewers were concerned that the measure was 'inconsistent' with the company's 'long-standing support' for expanding options for free and low-cost public access to scholarly literature... Before the act died it managed to create a rift within the academic publishing industry. The bill's chief supporter was the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which praised it for trying to prohibit federal agencies from unauthorised free public dissemination of journal articles.  However, several members of AAP - including the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and The Rockefeller University Press (TRUP) - opposed the act. Among other things, they had reservations about dismantling NIH's public access policy. The ACS agreed that the act overreached itself. 'We thought that it went a bit too far,' ACS spokesman Glenn Ruskin tells Chemistry World. He says the bill went beyond the ACS's concerns about avoiding mandates. 'We oppose federal mandates, but we felt that this was also kind of a reverse mandate,' Ruskin adds. Nevertheless, the ACS did support a previous incarnation of the bill in 2008. Pressure on Elsevier and the act's sponsors had intensified in recent months. More than 7700 researchers signed a petition to boycott Elsevier, in part over its lobbying for the bill. In addition, more than 90 universities and patient advocacy groups recently wrote to members of the committee overseeing the bill to warn that its passage would 'impede public access to valuable research results from work funded by federal agencies'. The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (IASTMP) recently released a statement signed by 47 publishers, including Elsevier, which said that they are committed to supporting any sustainable model that will get scientific research the biggest audience possible. 'Institutions and funders have a key role to play in ensuring that public access policies allow for funding of peer reviewed publication and publishing services in whatever journal that an author chooses,' the IASTMP states. 'Publishers look forward to working with all stakeholders to achieve this goal and to advance scholarly communication...' 'The collective voice of the faculty was very influential in the whole process,' says Barbara McFadden Allen, executive director of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which represents 13 US research universities. She calls the grass-roots movement against the act 'exceptional'...”

Link:

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2012/March/research-works-act-dead-open-access-NIH.asp

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.usa oa.legislation oa.rwa oa.nih oa.advocacy oa.signatures oa.petitions oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.copyright oa.societies oa.aaas oa.chemistry oa.acs oa.aap

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 14:42

Date published:

03/03/2012, 20:43