It was suggested that a Scannebago should be driving around the United States scanning public library works to make them available online. (I envision the Scannebago as a cross between a Winnebago, a Google Street View car and the pickup truck from Twister, but you might picture a more creative image.) Regardless of the process, many public libraries have scanned works over the past few years and now it is time to organize the digital works for public access across the country—and eventually internationally. Last year, the Berkman Center for Internet and Technology, with funding from the Alfred P.

Research encourages innovation, enriches education, stimulates the economy, and spurs further research and discovery. But what good would research be if you couldn’t access it? Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

This movement has been so successful in the world of peer-reviewed journal articles because researchers are very differently situated from most musicians and moviemakers. First, most scholarly journals do not buy their articles or pay royalties to authors. Second, most journal articles are based on publicly-funded research—that is, funded by taxpayers.

Citizens and policy-makers immediately see the logic of providing public access to the results of publicly-funded research, especially in fields with great potential for public benefit, such as medicine.

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.

On June 25, Senators John Cornyn and Joe Lieberman re-introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA, S.1373) in the Senate.

This is an important development. FRPAA would essentially extend the NIH open-access policy across the federal government. Most federally-funded researchers would be required to deposit their peer reviewed manuscripts in a suitable open access repository at the time of acceptance for publication, and the repositories would be required to release the open access copies no later than six months after publication.

Currently, the NIH and the Institute of Education Sciences (within the Dept of Ed) are the only federal agencies with similar policies, and both of them allow 12 month delays, not just the FRPAA six month delay. FRPAA would apply to all unclassified research funded in whole or part by agencies whose budgets for extramural research are $100 million/year or greater.

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.

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.