Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, May 09, 2006

More on the FRPAA and EC report

Mark Chillingworth, US legislators table tough OA bill, Information World Review, May 9, 2006. Excerpt:

A hard-hitting newly-tabled piece of US legislation could radically alter access to US-funded scientific research and embarrass the EC over its lack of clarity and action in its report on scientific publishing last month. Hard on the heels of a new EC report, Senators Joseph Lieberman and John Cornyn have proposed that US-funded research papers should be available freely within six months [of publication]. The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006states that every federal agency with a research budget over $100 million would have to implement a public access policy, which would require researchers funded by the US government to submit an article to a peer-review journal and to ensure free online access is available within six months....

The proposal has been widely welcomed. Gigi Sohn, president of the Public Knowledge advocacy group, said the bill “sends a signal” that taxpayers deserve access and that research should be shared with “everyone”.

The EC study passed up the opportunity to be as clear as Cornyn and Leiberman, stating in A1 of its findings that the EC should “promote and support the archiving of publications in open repositories after a time period to be discussed with publishers”. Publisher Matthew Cockerill at BioMed Central welcomed the EC report, saying: “It confirms that scientists and funders are getting a poor deal from the traditional publishing system.” But open access advocate Jan Velterop was dismissive. “It’s just another report and it will not change a lot,” he said.

Comment. (1) A detail on the Cornyn-Lieberman bill: It does not require federal grantees to submit their work to peer-reviewed journals, merely to provide OA to the peer-reviewed manuscripts that they do submit and that are accepted. (2) On British and American English: in the US, we say that a bill is "tabled" when the legislature halts or suspends active deliberation on it. It appears that the word has the opposite meaning in Britain, which I didn't know before. The Cornyn-Lieberman bill has been tabled in the British sense, not the American sense. (3) On the EC report: It's only a report today, but its recommendation A1 is exactly right and, if fleshed out into a policy, the policy would closely resemble the Cornyn-Lieberman bill.