Open Access to Research Blog Entries

If you think that the public should have access to the scientific research it pays for, tomorrow (January 21) is the deadline for submitting your view to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

From time to time you hear folks talking about broadband penetration and how impossible it is to get carriers to talk about how many within which communities are, and are not, being served.

Perhaps you heard this story this week:  there are now officially more cellphone-only households than there are wireline-only households in the United States.  

The interesting tweak to the story is its source.

Kudos to PK Board member Hal Abelson, who persuaded MIT’s faculty to make all of their scholarly papers available for free on the web. According to Wired, this is the “first university-wide policy” of its kind.

This decision is particularly timely, given the attacks on open access publishing by commercial publishers and their friends in Congress. In fact, the MIT decision goes beyond most other open access policies. The open access policy at the National Institutes of Health, for example, requires submission of NIH-funded research 12 months after that research is public.

Kevin Donovan is an undergraduate student at Georgetown University, where he founded the Georgetown chapter of Students for Free Culture. In between studying for classes, writing for TechDirt and Twittering prolifically, Donovan somehow finds the time to stump for OpenCourseWare (OCW)--a burgeoning movement of students, educators and technologists who believe that university course materials should be made available freely and openly on the Internet. In this interview, Donovan explains the benefits of OpenCourseWare, discusses the history of the movement and describes the challenges that OCW faces. For more information on OpenCourseWare, check out FreeCulture.org and the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a call to action to defend the NIH policy against the Conyers bill.  Excerpt:

Last week, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (Rep. John Conyers, D-MI) re-introduced a bill that would reverse the NIH Public Access Policy and make it impossible for other federal agencies to put similar policies into place. The legislation is H.R. 801: the “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act”.

Two publisher groups which supported the Conyers bill the last time around are supporting it again. No surprises here.

From the Statement of Patrick Ross, Executive Director of the Copyright Alliance, February 4, 2009:

The Copyright Alliance praises House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers for introducing HR-801, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act….

While there is lots of legislation that Public Knowledge disagrees with, we can often see the rationale for it. Not so with H.R. 801, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, now introduced for the second Congress in a row by House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI), and co-sponsored by Reps. Steve Cohen (D-TN), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Darryl Issa (R-CA) and Robert Wexler (D-FL). This bill would have the effect of overturning the “open access” to research policy of the National Institutes of Health, which requires that research funded by the agency to be made available for free in an online archive within 12 months of publication. The rationale for this policy is simple - if taxpayers are going to pay for research, taxpayers should get a return on their investment by getting free online access to that research.

Here at PK, we’ve been keeping our heads down the past few days, trying to fight against some really bad legislation. Once we finally get word of one, another one popped up. There are three in all (so far) are four (another was introduced during the writing of this post!!!) and we’re going to need your help to put them away.

S. 3325, The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008

First up is the Senate’s version of the House’s PRO-IP bill, S. 3325, “The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008.” Rashmi’s written a good breakdown of the differences between the bills, but that analysis may not hold up for long as we’re hearing that, as you read this, a deal may have been made to nix the differences between the bills so a compromise can be passed with ease.

We recently scanned all of the documents filed in response to the USTR’s request for public comments regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). They are presented below, if sometimes angularly, as well as on our issue summary page here.