New Bill Would Repeal NIH Open Access Policy

pigah writes "The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act has been reintroduced into Congress. The bill will ban open access policies in federal agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH). These policies require scientists to provide public access to their work if it has been funded with money from an agency with an open access policy. Such policies ensure that the public has access to read the results of research that it has funded. It appears that Representative John Conyers (D-MI), the author of the bill, is doing the bidding of publishing companies who do not want to lose control of this valuable information that they sell for exorbitant fees thereby restricting access by the general public to an essentially public good."

Comments

Re:Why are they so easyly bought or manipulated

[jessica_alba]

perhaps we should outsource our entire government to buddhist monks

Re:the challenges of the current policy

[claus.wilke]

I totally agree. The current policy is broken. It looks good on paper, but creates major headaches for the researchers.

In my view, the NIH is taking the easy way out. Instead of negotiating with journals directly, NIH just puts the burden on the researchers to figure out, for every publication separately, what is the correct way to handle it.

To get a sense of the hoops you have to jump through to do it properly,
read e.g. this blog post by a person whose job it is to take care of pubmed central submissions.

In practice, a highly productive lab would need an extra administrative person just to deal with these issues. That doesn't seem like a good way to spend research money to me.

Some problems solve themselves, so will this.

[minkie]

Slowly, the scientific world is starting to realize that they are no longer beholden to the publishing companies to distribute the results of their research.

A few days ago, at his first press conference, Barak Obama called on Sam Stein of the Huffington Post to ask a question. For those that don't understand the significance of this event, The Huffington post is a web-only newspaper. No paper.

Some day, the journal publishers will wake up, smell the coffee, and realize that the one essential step in the publishing process that they control, the hugely expensive printing presses, is no longer essential. Most of the value the journals add in the editorial arena (reviewing and editing) is done by the peers of the people who are submitting the articles. That same level of editorial review can just as easily happen on a web site, at far less cost. We're moving in that direction slowly, and if bills like this become law, that will just accelerate the pressure to move there.

in my area this is quickly being overturned

[Trepidity]

The expensive-journal commercial publishers don't have much of a competitive moat: anyone can publish PDFs on the internet with the word "Journal" attached to groups of them, and you've got a journal. If that anyone is well-respected in the field and the PDFs are hosted by a well-known university that also prints off some paper copies for archival, you've got yourself a new journal.

In my area this revolt against the commercial publishers has been quite rapid and successful. The entire board of editors left the journal Machine Learning in 2000, setting up the non-profit, open-access JMLR instead, which is now at least as prestigious (possibly moreso). In more general AI, the open-access, non-profit JAIR now has a much higher impact factor than the old Elsevier journal in the area, "Artificial Intelligence".

Conyers is owned by RIAA and big business

[charnov]

Conyers is one of the kookiest politicians we have and is famous for being owned by Disney, RIAA, MPAA and Big Pharma. I am a hardcore Dem but Pelosi and Conyers piss me off. Basically, he's a dick.