Bill Introduced to Roll Back NIH Open Access
February 6th, 2009Posted by: David Bruggeman
There is a legislative effort to push back the move toward open access in scientific publishing. Representative John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced a bill to roll back the National Institutes of Health requirement that its grantees provide a copy of their peer-reviewed articles to be published in PubMed Central, a free online database. The competing interests in this issue (and similar efforts to make federally funded research more available to the public) are the copyright interests of the journals (which are typically assigned them by the authors) and an interest in making research – especially that funded by citizens’ tax dollars – more accessible to the public.
I lean toward the latter, but I suspect that journals will be forced to revamp their publication models and business plans long after newspapers do, even though there are some similarities in how online access to information has undercut their respective market advantages.
Popularity: 1% [?]
February 7th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Hmmm…
This can’t be right. A liberal Democrat being against Open Access?
I thought the conspiracionalists ascribed all this to the evil anti-science James Inhofe and his money-grubbing corporate donors.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4914#comment-321609
February 7th, 2009 at 9:00 am
found this quote on the AAP website.
“The legislation would recognize the importance of the added value in quality assurance controls that journal publishers contribute to ensure the integrity of such articles as key components of the nation’s record on scientific research, and would help keep the Federal Government from undermining copyright protection for journal articles where private-sector publishers have added such significant value. ”
Hmm. I agree that organizing a quality review is a lot of work. Not all journal articles do get quality review. However, many editors and reviewers are volunteers and so that quality is provided by the folks who pay them for their day job (universities and government research facilities).This is a complex problem, but I agree with David that the solution does not seem to be to cut off the public from the research they pay for.
February 8th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
[...] 2009 · No Comments A Science and Tech Policy PhD candidate at GMU (Ryan Zelnio) posted an interesting article to facebook highlighting a bill that would end open-access to peer reviewed research coming out NIH [...]