University Presses Disagree With Publishers Group on Bill to Curb Public Access - Research - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"The battle over public access to federally funded research is heating up again, and university presses have been drawn into it. In the past week, several scholarly publishers, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's press, have parted company with a major publishing association over a bill in Congress that would curb public-access mandates....It's not at all certain that the Research Works Act stands much chance of becoming law. Similar legislative efforts in recent years have failed. But the new bill's existence has public-access advocates up in arms, and it has exposed yet again differences among publishers about how much control over access to the research they publish they're entitled to....[Although MIT Press is a member of the AAP,] Ms. Faran said the statement supporting the Research Works Act took her by surprise....The MIT Press publishes about 30 scholarly journals, which account for about a quarter of its income, she said. The press allows authors to share pre- and post-print versions of articles from those journals, and the Research Works Act "is not congruent with our other open-access policies," she said. That's only one reason she weighed in on the bill. "I also felt that the discussion that was going on was nowhere near nuanced enough," Ms. Faran explained. "It just was not recognizing the many complexities that are part of this." ..."