[Oa-italia] I: OA in USA: Marcia indietro?

Elena Giglia elena.giglia a unito.it
Mar 10 Feb 2009 12:57:07 CET


giro alla lista il commento di Harnad sull'argomento.
The publisher anti-Open-Access lobby is trying to use a
time when the
economy is down and the head of NIH is
out<http://www.nih.gov/about/director/index.htm> to
slip through a
Bill<http://www.google.com/search?sa=N&tab=nw&q=nih%20conyers%20bill%20>
that
would undo one of the most positive things Congress has
done for science:
the NIH Public Access
Act<http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=National%20Institutes%20of%20Health%20%28NIH%29>,
which requires NIH-funded research to be made freely
accessible to the
public that paid for it.

The Conyers
Bill<http://www.google.com/search?sa=N&tab=nw&q=nih%20conyers%20bill%20>
is
now trying to overturn the Public Access Act on the basis
of copyright
double-talk that would be ludicrous if it were not so
ominous:

The published reports of publicly funded research findings
are given away by
their researcher-authors free for all in order to maximize
their usage and
impact. The Conyers Bill proposes to "protect" their work
in exactly the
same way it protects proprietary Disney cartoons or How-To
bestsellers,
produced and sold by their authors to maximize their
royalty income: The
tendentiously misnamed "Fair Copyright in Research Works
Act<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.6845:>"
would rescind NIH's requirement that the results of the
research it funds
with taxpayer money should be deposited, free for all, on
the Web.

The Conyers Bill's copyright arguments -- almost
transparently contrived and
arbitrary -- have been decisively refuted point for point
by Law
Professor Michael
Carroll
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/468-guid.html>
and
other experts, just as all the other far-fetched,
self-serving arguments
marshalled by the publisher anti-OA lobby have (despite
the hiring of "
pit-bull
<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7126/full/445347a.html>"
Eric Dezenhall as public-relations consultant) been
repeatedly<http://blogsearch.google.ca/blogsearch?hl=en&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active&ie=UTF-8&q=%28critique+OR+rebuttal%29+%28publisher+OR+publishing%29++blogurl%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org%2F&btnG=Search+Blogs>
 rebutted
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=+site:listserver.sigmaxi.org+harnad+(critique+OR+rebuttal)+(publisher+OR+publishing)>each
time they were unleashed.

*It is time not only for OA advocates, but the general
public -- both US and
worldwide (because US OA policy has vast global
implications) -- to make
their voices heard in favor of the NIH Public Access
Policy and against the
Conyers Bill's Caricature of Copyright. TheAlliance for
Taxpayer
Access<http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/> is
hard at work to save the NIH Mandate; please consult them
on how you can
help. You can also express your support for mandating more
OA rather than
less<http://obamacto.uservoice.com/pages/general/suggestions/72264-require-open-access-for-publicly-funded-research>,
to President Obama.*

This would also be an opportune time to shore up the NIH
Mandate itself with
a small but important change in implementational detail
that will not only
increase its reach and make it a far better model for
emulation worldwide,
but it will also strengthen it against mischievous
attempts like the Conyers
Bill<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?serendipity%5Baction%5D=search&serendipity%5BsearchTerm%5D=conyers&serendipity%5BsearchButton%5D=%3E>
to
undermine it:

*(1)* Open Access is Open Access regardless of where on
the Web a paper is
freely accessible.

*(2)* Currently, the NIH mandate specifically stipulates
deposit in a
Central (3rd-party) Repository (CR), PubMed
Central<http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/>
.

*(3)* The majority <http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php> of
journals already
formally endorse OA self-archiving by authors, but most
endorse it *only in
the author's ownInstitutional Repository
(IR)<http://roar.eprints.org/?action=home&q=&country=&version=&type=institutional&order=name&submit=Filter>
rather
than a Central (3rd-party) Repository
(CR)<http://roar.eprints.org/?action=home&q=&country=&version=&type=subject&order=name&submit=Filter>
*. (This is because they fear that endorsing deposit in
3rd party CRs would
open the door to free-riding on their content by rival
publishers.)

*(4)* Apart from being immune to the
rival-publisher/free-rider objection,
IR deposit is also distributed across all the universities
and research
institutions in the world: That makes it a much more
diffuse, hence
difficult target for the publisher anti-OA publisher lobby
than PubMed
Central, NIH or Congress.

*(5)* IRs also make it possible to deposit papers as
"Closed Access" rather
than Open Access during any publisher embargo period. The
Closed-Access
paper's metadata (authors, title, journal, date, abstract,
etc.) are freely
accessible and searchable webwide, and link to an IR
Button<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html>
that
allows individual users to email the author an automatic
request for an
individual copy for research use with just one click,
which the author can
in turn fulfill with just one click, almost
instantaneously. Over 60% of
journals already endorse immediate OA for IR deposits. The
Button provides
"Almost OA" for the rest, to tide over researcher needs
during any embargo.

*(6)* Hence if the NIH deposit mandate specifically
stipulated deposit in
the author's IR, rather than deposit in PubMed Central, it
could harvest the
deposit's metadata to PubMed Central, harvest the
full-text after the
allowable embargo, and moot most of the copyright issues,
while indirectly
providing "Almost OA" even during the embargo (via the
Request-a-Copy
Buttons of the global network of IRs distributed across
the planet).

*(7)* This small change in implementational detail in
NIH's funder mandate
would also motivate and reinforce the adoption of
*institutional* mandates
at all NIH's fundees' institutions, which would in turn
help reinforce and
protect the NIH mandate (from Conyers-like attacks) as
well as extending it
to all institutional research output, funded and unfunded.

*(8)* Stipulating IR deposit rather than CR deposit will
also make the NIH
funder mandate a model that can be emulated worldwide,
globalizing the
adoption of both funder and institutional mandates and
helping to usher in
universal OA at long
last<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html>
.


*Stevan Harnad <http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/>*
American Scientist Open Access

--
dott.ssa Elena Giglia
Università degli Studi di Torino
Sistema Bibliotecario di Ateneo
Coordinatore Ambito 6 «Scienze storiche e  filosofiche,
pedagogiche e psicologiche»
via Sant'Ottavio, 20
10124 Torino
011.6703158
elena.giglia a unito.it

>
>
> ------------------ Messaggio originale -------------------
> Oggetto: Re: [Oa-italia] I: OA in USA: Marcia indietro?
> Da:      "Maria Cassella" <maria.cassella a unito.it>
> Data:    Mar, 10 Febbraio 2009, 8:53 am
> A:       mtmiconi2003 a yahoo.it
>          "Lista di discussione su temi relativi
> all'accesso aperto" <oa-italia a openarchives.it>
> ----------------------------------------------------------
>
> Dal 7 aprile 2008 la policy dei NIH è la seguente:
>> /The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall
>> *require
>> *that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have
>> submitted for
>> them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed
>> Central an
>> electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed
>> manuscripts upon
>> acceptance for publication, to be made publicly
>> available *no later
>> than 12 months after the official date of publication*:
>> Provided, That
>> the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a
>> manner
>> consistent with copyright law./
> la notizia della re-introduzione del Fair Copyright in
> Research Works
> Act, HR 801
> http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:H.R.801:  è
> commentata in modo esteso sul blog di P. Suber.
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/02/conyers-bill-is-back.html
> .
> "The premise of the bill, urged by the publishing lobby,
> is that the NIH
> policy somehow violates copyright law.  The premise is
> false and
> cynical.  If the NIH policy violated copyrights, or
> permitted the
> violation of copyrights, publishers wouldn't have to back
> this bill to
> amend US copyright law.  Instead, they'd be in court where
> they'd
> already have a remedy.  For a detailed analysis of the
> bill and point by
> point rebuttal to the publishing lobby's rhetoric, see my
> article from
> October 2008."
> non capisco in che modo possa la policy del NIH violare il
> copyright, ma
> va anche approfondito cosa dica questo Fair ....Act.
> saluti
> mc
>
>
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