Push to block free access to academic research falters in the US

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“A controversial US bill that was designed to block access to vast amounts of academic research appears to have collapsed after its co-sponsors renounced their support for it. The Research Works Act... initially had the backing of academic journal publisher Elsevier, which has recently become the target of a boycott by more than 7,500 academics... Hours after Elsevier indicated it would drop support for the bill, the two co-sponsors, Darrell Issa, a Republican of California, and Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat of New York, announced in a statement that they would not push for action after all because ‘the American people deserve to have access to research for which they have paid...’ In a statement released earlier, Elsevier said that it was devoted to ‘serving the global research community and ensuring the best possible access to research publications and data’ but conceded that its support for the Research Works Act had caused many to question that commitment... The capitulation by proponents of the bill meant that ‘at least the beast has been slain for now’, said Gavin Moodie, the principal policy advisor at RMIT University. But the fundamental problem remained: ‘The reward systems in academia rely almost exclusively on the publication system which is dominated by only a few players. This means academics are very limited in what they can do in practical protest.’ The National Health and Research Council announced last week that all council-funded research would have to be deposited in an open source repository within 12 months of publication, under a new policy to be introduced in July.”

Link:

http://theconversation.edu.au/push-to-block-free-access-to-academic-research-falters-in-the-us-5387

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.repositories oa.mandates oa.usa oa.legislation oa.rwa oa.nih oa.advocacy oa.signatures oa.petitions oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.copyright oa.australia oa.policies

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 14:47

Date published:

02/29/2012, 20:12