I try to steer clear of politics or legislation of any sort on the HealthLINE blog, but I have been seeing a lot posted on the Research Works Act published on library, medical and science blogs over the last week or so. And as it directly relates to what most of us do as medical librarians, I wanted to put a few links out there so those of us not up to speed on this issue can learn more about it.
The Research Works Act is a bill that was introduced into the US House on December 16, 2011, and it appears to be another attempt (the third since 2008) to circumvent the NIH’s open access policy. The Association of American Publishers is a supporter (of course) and here is an excerpt from their website:
“The Research Works Act will prohibit federal agencies from unauthorized free public dissemination of journal articles that report on research which, to some degree, has been federally-funded but is produced and published by private sector publishers receiving no such funding. It would also prevent non-government authors from being required to agree to such free distribution of these works.”
More Information:
-Action Alert from the MLA
-An NYT op-ed piece by Michael Eisen
-ALA’s opposition to the bill
-Blog post from The Digital Shift (Library Journal)
-Blog post from ePatients.net
-Blog post from Scientific American
-Blog post from the Society Pages
-Open Access Archivangelism blog post
See:
“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