Lt_opresearchworksact_24feb12. A tale of two analysts. What you can and can’t ask librarians. “Let’s ask our librarians to drop Elsevier subscriptions!” Some of the new-breed boycotters have eagerly suggested. Well, by all means try, but the Loon knows what the answer will be. Namely, “no.” Possibly with added eyeroll and an “are you a complete loon?” Elsevier doesn’t sell individual journal subscriptions to libraries these days, except when forced to—and forcing them to is so Sisyphean that only a bare few libraries have tried, as yet. (Economists consider this a sneaky way of force-selling crappy journals that would never make it in a sole-subscription world.
So when you tell a librarian “stop subscribing to Elsevier journals!” That issue aside, librarians have been trained not to consider the ethics of information production in their journal purchases. So. “What’s the deal we have with Elsevier just now? The bare fact is that most academic libraries are doing as little as possible to hasten the coming of open access, just barely enough to save face among their library peers. John Wiley & Sons have no plans to endorse the Research Works Act.
As opposition to the Research Works Act (RWA) grows, more and more scholarly publishers are distancing themselves from the proposed new bill. The latest is John Wiley & Sons. Wiley has emailed me the following statement: We do not believe that legislative initiatives are the best way forward at this time and so have no plans to endorse RWA. Instead we believe that research funder-publisher partnerships will be more productive. We believe this approach serves the interests of our diverse publishing partners (around 800 scholarly and professional societies), representing a broad range of opinion and policies on access.
The RWA would also prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar mandates on their funded researchers. John Wiley, we should note, is also a member of the AAP, and its technical, medical, and scholarly business Wiley-Blackwell is one of the larger scholarly publishers. Le Research Works Act: une menace pour l’Open Access. Dans l’ombre des cris de protestation se dressant contre les lois SOPA et PIPA, aux Etats-Unis, une seconde guerre s’est déclarée opposant cette fois les éditeurs scientifiques aux défenseurs de l’open access et du partage des connaissances. Le « Research Works Act », une proposition de loi visant à restreindre la diffusion des articles scientifiques, a été soumise en décembre 2011 au parlement américain. MyScienceWork joint sa voix à toutes celles qui s’élèvent pour s’opposer à cette loi.
Un article en anglais sur le sujet du Research Work Act est disponible ici. Le contexte social de cette controverse est le fonctionnement de base de la recherche académique qui, financée en grande partie par les impôts et les taxes sociales, crée des savoirs, de nouvelles technologies et communique par le biais des publications scientifiques.
MyScienceWork avait déjà publié deux articles sur le financement des publications scientifiques car ces modèles sont régulièrement remis en cause.