Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 10:23:53 +0530
From: Subbiah Arunachalam
Open access law introduced
US congressman joins push to promote public access to publicly funded
research | By Catherine Zandonella mailto:catzan@nasw.org
The debate over open access to scientific literature intensified this
week with the introduction of federal legislation designed to curb
publishers' control over scientific publishing. The bill, introduced in
the US House of Representatives yesterday (June 26) by Rep. Martin Sabo
http://www.house.gov/sabo/ (D-Minn.), is one part of a larger campaign,
launched by the open-access Public Library of Science
http://www.plos.org (PLoS), to raise a national debate on the issue of
access to scientific literature.
As part of the campaign, the PLoS this week began running a 30-second
television ad http://www.plos.org/support/playvideo.html designed to
introduce the topic to the lay public. The ads will run during popular
prime-time shows, such as "The Simpsons."
Rep. Sabo drafted and introduced the bill after the PLoS approached him
and explained that while federal tax dollars support research, access to
the results is limited to scientists whose libraries can afford high
subscription fees and to those lay people lucky enough to live near a
public institutional library.
"Most people are shocked when they find out they cannot access the
results of studies that their tax dollars paid for," said Sabo's
legislative assistant Lisa Tomlinson, who was involved in writing the
bill.
The proposed legislation, called the Public Access to Science Act, would
prohibit copyright protection for any works stemming from substantially
federally funded research. If enacted into law, the bill could radically
change how scientific journals do business
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20030616/03/, since most journals
currently require authors to transfer copyright to the journal as a
condition of publication.
The bill would amend an existing passage in copyright law to add federal
grantees to a provision that bars federal employees from copyright on
their publications. The bill does not state what percentage of the
research must be supported by federal dollars to trigger the no-copyright
rule. "We wanted to leave that to the discretion of the federal
agencies," said Tomlinson.
Without copyright, journals would still be able to publish articles much
as they do now, but they would not be able to control the distribution or
republishing of the articles. Publishers say they need copyright in order
to control a publication's quality. "Errors creep in as a paper is
repeatedly copied and circulated," said Peter Farnham, public affairs
officer for the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
http://www.asbmb.org, which publishes the Journal of Biological
Chemistry. The JBC's content already is freely available, he noted.
Advocates of open access say that publishers should not own the copyright
because the amount of work that the journal does-procuring peer review,
editing, and laying out the article on the page-does not justify
ownership.
"Their [the publisher's] contribution to the finished product pales in
comparison to contributions from scientists and the general public," said
Michael Eisen http://rana.lbl.gov/, cofounder of PLoS and a geneticist
at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of
California, Berkeley.
Bringing the public into the open-access debate is a natural next step
for PLoS, Eisen said. PLoS plans to launch
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20021220/06/ its first open-access,
peer-reviewed journal this October, and each paper will be accompanied by
a plain-English summary.
The television ads, which began running on June 23 in San Francisco,
Washington, and Boston, show a man who flies to work, rather than drives.
The voice-over implies that the open access to journals made the
technology possible.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20030627/04
