HealthLINE Blog

Elsevier  posted a news release on their website yesterday announcing their withdrawal of support for the Research Works Act.  The bill has been withdrawn in the U.S. house by the sponsors.  I suppose it would be unprofessional to skip around singing, ‘ding dong the bill is dead’, so I will refrain from doing so.

Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article on this development titled, ‘A Significant Flinch‘.

The Research Works Act was discussed in an earlier post, as was a scientist organized boycott against Elsevier.

Thanks to Lisa Huang from Collin College for sending along information about a boycott against Elsevier that is gaining momentum.

An  online pledge was created by Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge.  The pledge asks scientists not to publish, referee or do editorial work for any Elsevier title.  It now has over 3,000 signers (as of Feb 2, 2012).  Impressive work considering that the pledge has been up for less than a week.

Perhaps Elsevier will pay more attention to the complaints of the content creators, editors, and peer reviewers than they have to us librarians!

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

The most recent NLM Technical Bulletin describes changes in the works for PubMed’s advanced search page.  It looks like they are trying to make search building a little more intuitive and easy to use.