Open Access on a String – Cut It and It Will Grow Back

The Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced to the White House on February, 9 by representatives Doyle, Yoder, and and Lacy Clay. Exactly what Research Works Act wanted to prohibit, the FRPAA would require, or the open access policies that RWA aimed to eliminate, FRPAA would expand on... Basically, FRPAA would make free online public access to publicly funded research mandatory... the FRPAA wouldn’t specify the OA repository in which authors must deposit their manuscripts, the way the NIH specifies PubMed Central, and it mandates deposits in OA repositories, not submission to OA journals, and as such it focuses on green Open Access and does not provide funds for publication fees at fee-based OA journals (it ignores the Gold OA). FRPAA applies to the version approved by peer review but not yet copy-edited and it permits embargoes up to six months. Finally, it does not tell any kind of journals what their access policies or business models ought to be, it regulates grantees, not publishers. All these reminders about the past experience of the introduction of a similar bill, are explained through Harvard Open Access Project page, managed by Peter Suber... ‘Open access legislation like FRPAA doesn’t just happen in a vacuum,’ Michael Nielsen reminds us. ‘The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) is a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that works to promote open access policies within the US Government.’ Find your way to support them, here.”