http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/867-guid.html

EXCERPT:

The US Research Works Act (H.R.3699): 

“No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that — (1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or (2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.”

Translation and Comments: 

“If public tax money is used to fund research, that research becomes “private research” once a publisher “adds value” to it by managing the peer review.”

[Comment: Researchers do the peer review for the publisher for free, just as researchers give their papers to the publisher for free, together with the exclusive right to sell subscriptions to it, on-paper and online, seeking and receiving no fee or royalty in return].

“Since that public research has thereby been transformed into “private research,” and the publisher’s property, the government that funded it with public tax money should not be allowed to require the funded author to make it accessible for free online for those users who cannot afford subscription access.”

[Comment: The author's sole purpose in doing and publishing the research, without seeking any fee or royalties, is so that all potential users can access, use and build upon it, in further research and applications, to the benefit of the public that funded it; this is also the sole purpose for which public tax money is used to fund research.]”

H.R. 3699 misunderstands the secondary, service role that peer-reviewed research journal publishing plays in US research and development and its (public) funding….

http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/867-guid.html

This is terrible legislation of course. But SOPA is worse! (he’s gotten a fair amount of money from Elsevier, as you might expect.)

citation needed:
http://maplight.org/us-congress/contributions?sort=asc&order=Recipient&s=1&office_party=House%2CDemocrat%2CRepublican%2CIndependent&election=2012&string=Elsevier&business_sector=any&business_industry=any&source=All

After all, the bill is financed by industry, it has not been peer reviewed, and the bill would forbid its own entry into a federal database — the Congressional Record.

http://www.coronene.com/blog/?p=731

I think we do need to react every single time a congressperson does something or proposes something stupid. Each and every single time. It’s how democracy works. Otherwise things slip under the radar while backroom deals are made for votes on other legislators’ pet bills, and next thing you know they have the slim majority needed to pass more stupid laws. As for the president- he’s the president. We didn’t elect him dictator for life- he’ll be  gone eventually, perhaps even soon. He’s also been exceptionally jelly-spined, so don’t hold your breath for a veto.

Now, of course we must remain vigilant, but Issa’s bill is going nowhere, just like Conyer’s before. AAP has been trying to find a way around NIH’s open access policy since Zerhouni announced it (Reed Elsevier’s U.S. headquarters is in Maloney’s district). There’s overwhelming support for open access throughout NIH. All three co-chairs of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology are out-spoken open access advocates. And as we saw with Conyer’s bill (and several other issues), academia has the power to successfully oppose AAP. Open access is simply an established fact for NIH-funded research. So we should all just relax and focus instead on electing evidence-friendly politicians.

Further, the post implies a false dichotomy between open-access and non-open-access journals. We are not an open-access journal, but most of what we publish becomes open-access after 12 months, in accordance with NIH policy. Indeed, many of these “old 18th-century commercial journals” are the ones pushing new, technology-enabled models for the evaluation and distribution of research, notably BMJ, Lancet, Nature, JAMA, etc. 

Very few scholarly journals are profitable. And I don’t feel that it’s accurate to say that open-access journals “surpassed many of the old journals for quality and ‘impact factor’.” Open access journals are generally young, and ISI doesn’t even calculate and impact factor for the vast majority of them. (The Directory of Open Access Journals has 3,285 titles in its database; ISI ranks 190 of them.) Many of them are very good, but are nonetheless pretty immature shoestring operations that simply don’t compete with longer-lived traditional journals in either quality or impact factor. 

All this is to say that it’s not accurate to depict scholarly publishing as “new open-access journals vs. old for-profit journals.” There is a wide array of publishing models within that universe.

Whether PLoS is economically viable is a separate issue. Grants are propping the whole thing up at the moment. The PLoS ONE arm makes the most money, partially covering losses from the other arms. Scientists don’t know what to make of PLoS ONE, because it is a journal that refuses to separate wheat from chaff. If work is technically sound it’s in, regardless of significance or importance. So a lot of stuff of questionable importance is published there and it makes PLoS money. However, I had a dept. chair tell me she would not even count a PLoS ONE paper as a publication if she saw one on a C.V., so I don’t know if it will last.

Hold an election.

Reckon we can develop some proper anarchy before capitalism destroys civilisation?