Greg Piper, "Open-Access Research Helps Public Without Hurting Publishers, House IP Hears," Washington Internet Daily, September 12, 2008 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
The public's right to government-funded health research online was weighed against publishers' intellectual-property rights at a House IP Subcommittee hearing Thursday....
Subcommittee Ranking Member Howard Coble, R-N.C., said he wasn't yet sponsoring Conyers' Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (HR-6845), which would repeal the NIH policy (WID Sept 11 p5), because he had heard that some countries imposed similar requirements without violating IP treaty obligations....
A proposal by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., for NIH to post only unreviewed articles to PubMed Central, with a disclaimer, gained little support. Oman said the idea "can't be that off the wall" because post-publication review is gaining ground in scientific circles. Frank said it would be "disastrous" for NIH to put its "imprimatur" on such articles, even with a disclaimer, since scientific journals reject nine submissions in 10. Zerhouni agreed.
Comment. Some valuable detail not reported elsewhere. Just one quibble: "The public's right to government-funded health research online was weighed against publishers' intellectual-property rights...." This would be more accurate if it referred to publishers' IP interests, or financial interests, rather than to their IP rights. Publishers don't have any IP rights in NIH-funded research except the rights that NIH-funded authors voluntarily transfer to them. Publishers want those rights, but they don't already have them and they don't have a right to demand them.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/12/2008 07:47:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
