Happy New Year to all our readers!

The year certainly opened up with a bang, especially for librarians and open access advocates passionately opposed to the H.R. 3699: Research Works Act (RWA). This controversial bill has created an atmosphere of tension surrounding the dissemination of scholarly scientific and medical research supported by NIH funding.

Representatives Darrell Issa, a California Republican (R-CA), and Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat (D-NY), introduced the bill in mid-December 2011. (Note: Carolyn Bosher Maloney is the U.S. Representative for New York’s 14th congressional district which includes Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s location.)  If it were to pass, it would reverse the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) Open Access Policy which mandates that any published research supported by NIH grants be made publicly available within 12 months via PubMed Central, a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.

Under the NIH Open Access Policy, authors give permission for Open Access when they are still the copyright owners.  The proposed bill would require that the publisher’s consent be obtained as well.  I found that OPENBIOMED.INFO did a good job highlighting the intent of the bill in bullet format.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) issued a press release in December supporting the bill.

This is not the first congressional challenge to Open Access. Similar bills were proposed in 2008 and 2009 as The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (H.R. 6845 and H.R. 801), both sponsored by House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI), and cosponsored by subcommittee members Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Robert Wexler (D-FL). Let us hope we see a similar outcome for the RWA as these bills faded away and did nothing to reverse the NIH’s Open Access Policy.

For those who want to voice their opinion, visit taxpayeraccess to learn how.

Donna Gibson
Director of Library Services