Well, much has been said recently about the ickyness of a new bill in Congress that is targeting open access publishing.
For more about how this new "Research Works Act" is a bad idea see
- Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research from my brother Michael Eisen
- Why Is Open-Internet Champion Darrell Issa Supporting an Attack on Open Science? from Rebecca Rosen at the Atlantic
- Peter Suber on Google Plus Yesterday New bill to block open access to publicly-funded research
- Tim O'Reilly on Google Plus: Regulatory Capture at Work
And many more.
I think a key aspect of this bill is the disturbing support for it from the The Association of American Publishers. Now, this association includes many you might expect to be in favor of an anti open access bill, like Elsevier and Disney and Wiley and Macmillan. But it also includes many publishers I would not have expected to see supporting this bill such as the University of California Press and MIT Press and there National Science Teachers Association The full list of members of AAP is here. I think it is clearly time for the Academic community to pressure groups to abandon AAP as suggested by John Dupais: Scholarly Societies: It's time to abandon the AAP over The Research Works Act
I therefore am calling on the academic and scientific communities to look at the list of members of AAP and if one of them is an institution with which you have any affiliation please call on them to drop themselves from the membership list. I will be doing this for the UC Press ASAP ...
UPDATE
Just discovered a similar but much more detailed call from Cameron Neylon.
UPDATE2
See my post from 2007 calling for a boycott of AAP over their inane "PRISM" effort
See:
ReplyDelete"Research Works Act H.R.3699:
The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/867-guid.html
EXCERPT:
The US Research Works Act (H.R.3699): "No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that -- (1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or (2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work."
Translation and Comments:
"If public tax money is used to fund research, that research becomes "private research" once a publisher "adds value" to it by managing the peer review."
[Comment: Researchers do the peer review for the publisher for free, just as researchers give their papers to the publisher for free, together with the exclusive right to sell subscriptions to it, on-paper and online, seeking and receiving no fee or royalty in return].
"Since that public research has thereby been transformed into "private research," and the publisher's property, the government that funded it with public tax money should not be allowed to require the funded author to make it accessible for free online for those users who cannot afford subscription access."
[Comment: The author's sole purpose in doing and publishing the research, without seeking any fee or royalties, is so that all potential users can access, use and build upon it, in further research and applications, to the benefit of the public that funded it; this is also the sole purpose for which public tax money is used to fund research.]"
H.R. 3699 misunderstands the secondary, service role that peer-reviewed research journal publishing plays in US research and development and its (public) funding.
It is a huge miscalculation to weigh the potential gains or losses from providing or not providing open access to publicly funded research in terms of gains or losses to the publishing industry: Lost or delayed research progress mean losses to the growth and productivity of both basic research and the vast R&D industry in all fields, and hence losses to the US economy as a whole.
What needs to be done about public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research?
The minimum policy is for all US federal funders to mandate (require), as a condition for receiving public funding for research, that: (i) the fundee’s revised, accepted refereed final draft of (ii) all refereed journal articles resulting from the funded research must be (iii) deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication (iv) in the fundee'’s institutional repository, with (v) access to the deposit made free for all (OA) immediately (no OA embargo) wherever possible (over 60% of journals already endorse immediate gratis OA self-archiving), and at the latest after a 6-month embargo on OA.
It is the above policy that H.R.3699 is attempting to make illegal...
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/867-guid.html