...On Thursday, Conyers slammed the powerful House Appropriations Committee for not consulting with his panel before pushing through the rule as part of a 2008 funding package.
"We have tried to communicate repeatedly with the leader of that committee ... and what did we get? Nothing," Conyers said at a hearing of the Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee.
He said he viewed the silence as a blow-off by Appropriations Chairman David Obey and said he was frustrated that appropriators ran roughshod over the "sacred jurisdiction" of his committee to act "summarily, unilaterally and probably incorrectly." ...
Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee Chairman Howard Berman, D-Calif., said he saw merits to both sides but did not publicly endorse Conyers' bill...
He and...ranking member Howard Coble, R-N.C., said they needed more time to learn about the issue before taking a position. Berman told CongressDaily after the hearing that further action on the bill would probably be held over until the 111th Congress....
Comments
There are many backstage forces at work here. One is publisher lobbying. But another is turf jealousies among the powerful House committees.
Why did the House Appropriations Committee, which shepherded the OA mandate bill through to a vote, not run the language by the House Judiciary Committee? I can only guess. Perhaps because the Judiciary Committee only needed to be involved if the bill raised copyright issues, and it didn't raise copyright issues.
Who says the NIH bill didn't raise copyright issues? One person who says so is William Patry, former Copyright Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee and now Senior Copyright Counsel at Google. See my July 2008 blog post on his remarks.
Who knows how strong the Judiciary Committee would have found the publishing lobby's arguments on their own, without the secret sauce of turf rivalries?
Update. Not only has Berman not endorsed the Conyers bill, but he publicly opposes it. See Andrea Gawrylewski in TheScientist (September 12, 2008):
...The new legislation would "turn back the clock" by prohibiting the NIH from mandating public access as a condition of researchers receiving funding, according to an introductory statement [at the hearing] by chairman of the subcommittee considering the issue, Howard Berman, Democratic representative from California....
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.
