Anti-Open Access Bill Sneaks Into Congress
Posted by David Bruggeman on December 24, 2011
Amidst the recent Congressional contretemps over payroll tax increases and intellectual property bills that might “break the Internet” Representative Darrell Issa introduced H.R. 3699, The Research Works Act. This bill appears to put a stake in the ground against the National Institutes of Health open access policy and would run against the bills supporting open access for federally funded research. How it might affect the ongoing open access review at the Office of Science and Technology Policy is unclear (the deadlines for comment there have been extended, slightly). It might depend on which finishes first, that process or this bill.
Such efforts aren’t exactly new, but this bill takes a less complicated tack than its companion from the previous Congress. H.R. 3699 simply mandates private-sector publisher consent (as well as the consent of the author(s) and their employer(s)) before any federal program would share such ‘private-sector research’ work.
This would arguably end the current NIH open access guidelines, which require depositing a copy of their federally funded work in PubMed, and otherwise making the research available after a set amount of time.
What’s a little surprising is that the sponsor of this bill, Representative Darrell Issa of California, has generally been in favor of greater access to information. This includes areas of scientific research. It would seem in this case that the Congressman was more responsive to the income streams of academic publishers than interests of disseminating federally funded information. Public access bills have not gotten far in the Congress over the last few years (on either side of the issue), and I don’t expect that to change. Of course, feel free to express your displeasure with the bill at your leisure.
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