The bill summary says:
Research Works Act - Prohibits a federal agency from adopting,
maintaining, continuing, or otherwise engaging 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; or *(2) requires that any actual or
prospective author, or the author's employer, assent to such network
dissemination. *
Defines "private-sector research work" as an article intended to be
published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of
such an article, that is not a work of the U.S. government, describing
or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a federal agency
and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered
into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer
review or editing, but does not include progress reports or raw data
outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a
funding agency in the course of research.
==========================================
It is the second provision that really cuts the legs out from the NIH
open access policy. What the NIH policy does is to make open access
publication a condition imposed on the grant holders in publishing work
that the NIH funded. This has provided the necessary lever for
NIH-funded authors to be able to publish in well-respected journals and
still to be able to require that, after a year, their work be available
without charge to the scientific community. Without that lever we go
back to the unlamented old system (at least unlamented by almost
everybody other than Elsevier) in which pubishers could impose an
absolute copyright transfer that barred the authors from ever posting
copies of their work on the web. People affiliated with libraries with
the appropriate subscriptions to the appropriate archiving services may
not have noticed the difference, but for the significant portions of
both researchers and students who did not have such access, the NIH open
access policy was by itself a major game changer, making much more
literature rapidly accessible, and even more importantly changed the
culture, making open access much more respectable.
The NIH policy does nothing more than put grant-sponsored research on
almost the same footing as research done directly by the government
which has never been subject to copyright at all, on the theory that, if
the tax-payers already paid for the research, they should have open
access to the fruits of that research. This law would kill that policy.
This would be a major step backwards.
Please read:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/evo-eco-lab/2012/01/16/mistruths-insults-from-the-copyright-lobby-over-hr-3699/
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/action_access/12-0106.shtml
http://www.care2.com/causes/open-access-under-threat-hr-3699.html
Please support the petition. This is a very bad bill. It is not about
protecting copyright, it is an effort to restrict the free flow of
scientific information in our community.
Regards,
Herbert
On 2/16/12 9:02 AM, Fischmann, Thierry wrote:
Herbert
I don't see how the act could affect the NIH open access policy. Could you
please shed some light on that?
What I read seems reasonable and I intend to ask my representatives to support
this text. But obviously I am missing something and like to learn from you
first.
Regards
Thierry
-----Original Message-----
From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Herbert
J. Bernstein
Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2012 8:16 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] Fwd: HR3699, Research Works Act
Dear Ian,
You are mistaken. The proposed law has nothing to do with preventing the
encouragement people to break copyright law. It has everything to do with
trying to kill the very reasonable NIH open access policy that properly
balances the rights of publishers with the rights of authors and the
interests of
the scientific community. Most publishers fare quite well under a
policy that
gives them a year of exclusive control over papers, followed by open access.
It is, unfortunately, a standard ploy in current American politics to
make a
law which does something likely to be very unpopular and very unreasonable
sound like it is a law doing something quite different.
Please reread it carefully. I think you will join in opposing this
law. Science
benefits from the NIH open access policy and the rights of all concerned
are respected. It would be a mistake to allow the NIH open access policy to
be killed.
I hope you will sign the petition.
Regards,
Herbert
On 2/16/12 6:29 AM, Ian Tickle wrote:
Reading the H.R.3699 bill as put forward
(http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:HR03699:@@@L&summ2=m&;)
it seems to be about prohibiting US federal agencies from having
policies which permit, authorise or require authors' assent to break
the law of copyright in respect of published journal articles
describing work funded at least in part by a US federal agency. I'm
assuming that "network dissemination without the publisher's consent"
is the same thing as breaking the law of copyright.
It seems to imply that it would still be legal for US federal agencies
to encourage others to break the law of copyright in respect of
journal articles describing work funded by say UK funding agences! -
or is there already a US law in place which prohibits that? I'm only
surprised that encouraging others to break the law isn't already
illegal (even for Govt agencies): isn't that the law of incitement
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incitement)?
This forum in fact already has such a policy in place for all journal
articles (i..e not just those funded by US federal agencies but by all
funding agencies), i.e. we actively discourage postings which incite
others to break the law by asking for copies of copyrighted published
articles. Perhaps the next petition should seek to overturn this
policy?
This petition seems to be targeting the wrong law: if what you want is
free flow of information then it's the copyright law that you need to
petition to overturn, or you get around it by publishing in someplace
that doesn't require transfer of copyright.
Cheers
-- Ian
On 16 February 2012 09:35, Tim Gruene<[email protected]> wrote:
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Dear Raji,
maybe you could increase the number of supporters if you included a link
to (a description of) the content of HR3699 - I will certainly not sign
something only summarised by a few polemic sentences ;-)
Cheers,
Tim
On 02/15/2012 11:53 PM, Raji Edayathumangalam wrote:
If you agree, please signing the petition below. You need to register on
the link below before you can sign this petition. Registration and signing
the petition took about a minute or two.
Cheers,
Raji
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Seth Darst<[email protected]>
Date: Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 12:40 PM
Subject: HR3699, Research Works Act
To:
Rep. Caroline Maloney has not backed off in her attempt to put forward the
interests of Elsevier and other academic publishers.
If you oppose this measure, please sign this petition on the official 'we
the people' White House web site. It needs 23,000 signatures before
February 22nd and only 1100 so far. Please forward far and wide.
Oppose HR3699, the Research Works Act
HR 3699, the Research Works Act will be detrimental to the free flow of
scientific information that was created using Federal funds. It is an
attempt to put federally funded scientific information behind pay-walls,
and confer the ownership of the information to a private entity. This is an
affront to open government and open access to information created using
public funds.
This link gets you to the petition:
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/oppose-hr3699-research-works-act/vKMhCX9k
- --
- --
Dr Tim Gruene
Institut fuer anorganische Chemie
Tammannstr. 4
D-37077 Goettingen
GPG Key ID = A46BEE1A
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