A bill sponsored by Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-New York) and Congressman Darrell Issa (R-California), The Research Works Act (H.R.3699), is intended to prohibit federal agencies from requiring public online access to grant-funded research results. (Currently NIH has such a requirement.)
TaxpayerAccess has started a letter-writing campaign opposing this bill, and scientists who value the NIH open-access policy may want to add a letter of their own to this.
There is a good explanation of the advantages in scientific education to having open-access literature, especially for community colleges, on the Discovering Biology in a Digital World blog: Raising the barriers: restricting access to scientific literature will hurt STEM education.
The International Society for Computational Biology has an official policy supporting such open-access policies for funding (see my post ISCB open access policies and the official policy statement). Perhaps the President of the ISCB needs to write a letter in opposition to HR 3699.
By e-mail I got the following 3 pointers to other blogs on this issue:
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=837
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/crude-matter/2012/01/07/the-research-works-act-would-deny-taxpayers-access-to-federally-funded-research/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/01/elsevier-funded-ny-congresswoman-carolyn-maloney-wants-to-deny-americans-access-to-taxpayer-funded-research/
Comment by gasstationwithoutpumps — 2012 January 8 @ 11:38 |
[...] the post Rolling back open access, I passed on the message about the badly thought-out Research Works Act (H.R.3699), which is [...]
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