SOPA and the Research Works Act: Evil master plan or do publishers think so little of us?

This week there’s been some interesting and disgusting things going on within scholarly publishing. Most of the internet is up at arms about SOPA, the ludicrous Stop Online Piracy Act. Earlier this week I stumbled across an interesting blog post Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA. I think the same could be said for any of the content publisher – books, music, video games, not just film. Look at the list of SOPA supporters. Along with the usual suspects (major lables, the big 6, etc), you get Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer. Nice to know they’re against net neutrality. Cameron Neylon wrote an excellent post on how SOPA will affect scientific research. You need to read it. Loud library advocate Andy Woodworth is making a list to talk to vendors at ALA Midwinter next month. Good on him. I was thinking about talking to some folks at SLA later this month, but then something else caught my eye…

The Research Works Act (H.R. 3699). A post from the SPARC OA forum distils it:

“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.”

Not surprisingly, publishers think this is a great idea.

The Research Works Act will prohibit federal agencies from unauthorized free public dissemination of journal articles that report on research which, to some degree, has been federally-funded but is produced and published by private sector publishers receiving no such funding. It would also prevent non-government authors from being required to agree to such free distribution of these works. Additionally, it would preempt federal agencies’ planned funding, development and back-office administration of their own electronic repositories for such works, which would duplicate existing copyright-protected systems and unfairly compete with established university, society and commercial publishers.

This is just bullshit. Especially in light of the publishers’ healthy profit margins often on the work of academics paid in prestige. The need to publish in these big, expensive journals for a lot of faculty is the only way they can attain tenure. The only way they can fund their work is to get federal (or other publicly funded) grants. Tax payers can pay for the research, but then they can’t see the results. It’s a great racket for the publishers. (Sounds sort of like the vicious cycle of federal student loans and the for-profit colleges, which is pretty much any university these days.)

Publishers are still upset about the NIH Public Access Policy. UC Berkeley professor Michael Eisen yesterday blogged about Elsevier paying NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney to promote the bill. Jason Baird Jackson from Indian University asks who else is Elsevier lobbying for this bill?

It’s outrageous that in a time when everybody’s budgets are being squeezed, the big scholarly publishers are getting more creative about making huge profit margins. If the government is going to fund research, they need to also fund the publishing because that’s the only way the public will have access to the information and data. The funding for publishing has always been an afterthought or meant to be a cost recovery tool, which explains how NTIS and the National Academies “function”.

I’ll be in DC a couple of weeks for the TRB Annual Meeting. (TRB is part of the National Academies.) It’s where the transportation research agenda is discussed, research that will be funded by the taxpayers. I’ll try to get some answers.

The Research Works Act is seriously bad news, as is SOPA. Maybe it’s because I just watched all of the Bond films, but I really hope this isn’t just general incompetence but a master plan from SPECTRE to take over the world by destroying scientific research and scholarly publishing. Blofeld, Largo, Dr. No, and their henchmen are off springing the mousetrap. We just need James Bond to stop them. Or us.


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4 responses to “SOPA and the Research Works Act: Evil master plan or do publishers think so little of us?”

  1. Carol Hutchins Avatar
    Carol Hutchins

    You have a significant typo in your 1st sentence: name of the act does not use word ‘privacy’.

  2. Kendra Avatar

    Thanks for the heads up! It’s weird how concerns about piracy and privacy are becoming intertwined.

  3. Stevan Harnad Avatar

    See:
    “Research Works Act H.R.3699:
    The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again”

    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.

    It is a huge miscalculation to weigh the potential gains or losses from providing or not providing open access to publicly funded research in terms of gains or losses to the publishing industry: Lost or delayed research progress mean losses to the growth and productivity of both basic research and the vast R&D industry in all fields, and hence losses to the US economy as a whole.

    What needs to be done about public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research?

    The minimum policy is for all US federal funders to mandate (require), as a condition for receiving public funding for research, that: (i) the fundee’s revised, accepted refereed final draft of (ii) all refereed journal articles resulting from the funded research must be (iii) deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication (iv) in the fundee’’s institutional repository, with (v) access to the deposit made free for all (OA) immediately (no OA embargo) wherever possible (over 60% of journals already endorse immediate gratis OA self-archiving), and at the latest after a 6-month embargo on OA.

    It is the above policy that H.R.3699 is attempting to make illegal…

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

  4. Charles Avatar

    Taking away the public’s right, to access research that they paid for is ludicrous.

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