Publisher Pulls Supports; 'Research Works Act' Killed 72
crabel writes "It appears the dreaded Research Works Act is dead. The bill would have prevented agencies of the federal government from requiring public access to federally subsidized research. After Elsevier pulled its support, it was decided that no legislative action will be taken on the bill."
A glimmer of hope as well: "Meanwhile, attention has shifted to another proposed bill: the reintroduced Federal Research Public Access Act, which would require public access." Elsevier has vowed to battle it, however.
This is the first I am hearing about this (Score:4, Insightful)
weill be a good idea to keep an eye on what this guy/group pushing this is up to
A good thing? (Score:0, Insightful)
Why is the summary making this sound like a good thing?
Don't we want public access to things funded by public money?
Of course Elsevier opposes public access (Score:5, Insightful)
When you publish a paper in most peer-reviewed journals, you don't own that paper. A condition to getting published above and beyond the peer-review process is to sign over the copyright to the journal. You pay the publisher to print the article and then have to sign over the copyright. This is allowed to continue in large part because of the "publish or perish" environment in academia. The publishers can then charge excessive fees to access articles.
Federally funded research should be in the public domain unless there's a very good reason it shouldn't be, such as legitimate national security interests. Elsevier is objecting to the FRPAA because mandating open access to federal research would prevent them from hiding it behind copyrights.
The current system is broken in many ways. FRPAA isn't the answer, but it's a step in the right direction.
Seems appropriate (Score:4, Insightful)
As anyone who has ever done research before would know, the name of the bill is a total fabrication. Good riddance.
Typeset your own papers (Score:4, Insightful)
Engineers and Computer Scientists have this sorted with LaTeX. Others can take advantage of graphical editors for LaTeX like LyX, and generate publication quality manuscripts. The typeset output from the LaTeX IEEE template is not identical to what the IEEE finally typeset, but it is a very close copy. Similarly the Microsoft Word template is pretty good too.
I know many journals only want 'plain text' and then do the typesetting. There is a lot of skill in this and it does cost money. Perhaps if the journals received LaTeX formatted text then the paper could be open access for free? Fat chance.
Open Access is required at my university, and we are required to publish the 'accepted version', but not the 'published version' (with some exceptions). OAKList [qut.edu.au] provides a reference for publication policies.
Re:I agree (Score:5, Insightful)