Help kill HR6845

This Ars Technica article covers efforts to push through HR-6845 ("Fair Copyright in Research Works Act") would subvert current NIH policy requiring NIH funded work be made open access within 12 months of publication (typically through PubMed Central). Quoting the article:

The House of Representatives has seen the introduction of legislation, HR 6845 that, depending on its final format, may significantly curtail or eliminate the NIH's ability to continue its open access policy. The current bill would prevent any arm of the federal government from making research funding contingent upon "the transfer or license to or for a Federal agency of... any right provided under paragraph (1) or (2) of section 106 in an extrinsic work, to the extent that, solely for purposes of this subsection, such right involves the availability to the public of that work." Those Section 106 rights include the reproduction of the work.

Although that would seem to rule out the existing NIH policy, there is a certain amount of legal wiggle room there. For example, the NIH could fund a private entity to maintain PMC, and thus have the right to reproduction transferred to an independent entity. Nevertheless, the bill would appear to directly target the prior legislation that put the NIH in the business of mandating public access in the first place.

As is seemingly typical of many pieces of legislation, these one seems to have been pushed by "special interests" (in this case, traditional scientific publishing houses) and sponsored by Representatives who really have no idea what the hell is going on. Quoting the article once:

[M]any of the representatives were clearly in need of a primer in academic publishing. Different members of the Subcommittee expressed surprise at various aspects of the current system, such as the fact that peer reviewers perform the function free (although, as noted, the process of arranging for peer review can be expensive). Also eliciting surprise was the revelation that authors are not paid by publishers for the transfer of copyright.

In fact, many publishers charge money for the publication of scientific research, even those that obtain copyright to the work in the process. Dr. Elias Zerhouni, director of the NIH, shocked Berman when he mentioned that the NIH hands out $100 million a year to grant recipients specifically to cover the cost of publishing their results. It would certainly have been possible for those testifying in favor of the open access policy to argue that the public pays part of the cost of nearly every stage of the publishing process, and might expect to have some access to the end product.

Open access is critical in helping scientists disseminate their work, not only to their peers, but to the public as well. It prevents publishers from taking publicly funded scientific work and locking it behind "pay walls" and in some sense, provides accountability for what scientists do with your tax dollars. Coturnix and revere provide more commentary and examples of letters you can send to your Congressperson or Senator.

Because I'm posting this so late, you only have until tomorrow (24 September) to get your letter in. But if you get the time, please do so. We need to stop this bill before it subverts our ability to do research work in the United States.