Abstract
The dying light of the George W. Bush presidency was marked by, among other things, a legislative move to derail recent gains in the federal government's opening of science. In particular, the innocuous sounding “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act” (HR 6845) introduced into the House by John Conyers, Jr. (DEM-MI), on 9 September 2008 [1] was poised to shut down the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy [2], as well as forestall the spread of this open-access spirit to other areas of federally sponsored research and scholarship. Hearings were held, but the bill did not make it through the House. End of story? Not quite.
Highlights
I can’t help but agree with Peter Suber’s prediction that Congress will see the likes of the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act again, though perhaps not from Conyers, who was an early supporter of Obama [3]
The scholarly publishing market depends on government interference in the first instance
As indicated by their support for the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, publishers are taking a stand against archiving
Summary
The government allows publishers to exercise monopoly rights over this research through copyright law, a form of market interference warranted by the works’ contribution to “the progress of Science and useful Arts,” as the United States Constitution puts it [4].
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