The Research Works Act is a Distraction that Works

“You only have to search for ‘Research Works Act’ or look for the #rwa hashtag on Twitter or follow the increasing number of people signing on to the petitions against RWA... Given this opposition, it seems unlikely that this legislation will pass... The RWA is a distraction that works: for weeks now have open access supporters from all walks of science spent countless hours in opposition to this legislation. All these hours could have been spent developing an alternative scholarly communication system... convincing librarians to withdraw their funds from these publishers by cutting their subscriptions...investing the saved funds from these canceled subscriptions into a system that hosts and makes accessible all scholarly literature and data via our libraries... The corporate publishers make an annual profit of about 4 billion US dollars, or just under 11 million every single day of the year. Elsevier, in 2010, made a profit of about 3 million US$ per day... Hence,from now on, I will try to reduce the amount of opposition to publishers and instead focus my efforts more on convincing librarians to skip commercial publishers altogether and use the funds currently tied up in subscriptions to buy some servers to host all the literature and data... Let's bring our scholarly communication system back into our hands! Hit the publishers where it hurts: their pocketbooks...”