The Research Works Act: the scientific researcher’s SOPA (minus the Wikipedia megaphone)

Photograph: LJSphotography/Alamy (guardian.co.uk)

With SOPA and PIPA in hibernation, many are scanning the horizon for the next threat to open information exchange. For the scientific community, that new threat may already be here in the form of the Research Works Act (RWA), a bill that, in a single sentence, rejects any current or future federal policy that promotes and/or requires open access of “private-sector research work” without the publisher’s consent. In other words, it nullifies the 2008 NIH Open Access Policy that requires taxpayer-funded research to be made freely available within a year of publication and puts distribution power exclusively back into publishers’ hands.

In the infant stages of the legislative process, the RWA has had a moderate presence in the biomedical blogosphere with lesser coverage in mainstream news. That said, the very public global uprising against SOPA and PIPA could give the RWA opposition some needed momentum.

Not surprising, the American Association of Publishers (AAP) and Elsevier support the bill, citing a need to protect from government interference the value added by publishers (including peer review and editing) to scholarly communications. Conversely, the American Library Association with nine other organizations submitted a letter to Congress last week formally opposing the bill and reaffirming their support of the NIH open access model.

Source: InTechWeb Blog (intechweb.wordpress.com/)

But what I find interesting is the speed with which many publishers (even AAP members), including the Nature Publishing Group and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), have released statements (Nature statement; AAAS statement) in opposition of the RWA, explicitly distancing themselves from the AAP’s now unpopular stance and, in some cases, timing their published statements to coincide with the Wikipedia blackout.

While most Americans still may not be aware of RWA’s existence, it’s clear that their opposition to SOPA and PIPA has left a lasting impression that is being utilized to battle other current threats to open information.