Regular readers of this blog know that I would, as this headline suggests, resist strongly any attempt to force a copyright owner’s ability to manage his or her rights over her copyrights to a mere 12 months. But that’s what some in Congress have proposed with a well-meaning but ill-advised piece of legislation.

A key House oversight subcommittee today is holding a hearing on public access to federally funded research. As a taxpayer, I don’t want to help pay for research that then isn’t available to the scientific community or the broader public. But I also want the research to be published to begin with, and copyright acts as an incentive for academic and scientific publishing, just as it does with any other kind of publishing. So why would we want to limit a journal publisher, who has invested in a peer-review process designed to separate junk science from that of true value, from being able to see that investment returned?

In his testimony today, Association for American Publishers VP-Government and Legal Affairs Allan Adler provides research performed by the American Psychological Association. The data, covering 37 separate journals, found that only 15% of the downloads of their journal articles occurred in the first year of publication. This makes sense; robust science presumably has a shelf life of more than one year, even in our rapidly changing world. But the Federal Research Public Access Act would require peer-reviewed journal works in which the original research had been in any way funded by tax dollars to be posted to a government web site within 12 months of journal publication.

How many peer-reviewed journal articles will be published if the publisher is asked to forfeit 85% of their economic return?

Here’s the “nut graph” of this issue. The legislation doesn’t require the actual raw research data funded to be posted, and it doesn’t provide an avenue for every taxpayer-funded scientist to upload the papers they author on their data to a government site. A site like that would have little value, it would be like white noise on an old out-of-reach UHF station. No, the government wants professional industry journals to pick out the truly valuable papers through peer review, and then forfeit any ability to manage the publication rights of those papers after one year. It’s a mandatory government contract arrangement for journals without their compensation and with significant reduction in their revenue streams.

This doesn’t just affect major corporations. In fact, it significantly impacts numerous non-profit scientific organizations that provide robust services to members of their scientific fields. Often, the services these organizations provide are funded by the revenue generated from their highly respected, peer-reviewed journals. This could have a serious impact on the development of the next generation of scientific researchers.

In his testimony, Mr. Adler points out that while there are many public policy challenges facing us, “there is no crisis in the world of scholarly publishing or in the dissemination of scientific materials.” He notes that the America COMPETES Act reauthorization, developed in the House Science Committee, brings all stakeholders together and distinguishes between digital data and scholarly publications, taking into account peer review.

Leaders of the House Judiciary Committee have been frustrated by this push to essentially strip publishers of copyright rights after one year, and with good reason. Others in Congress are beginning to recognize that there is more to this story than one would first believe. As a believer in copyright for all rightsholders, I shudder when I see the U.S. government looking at a potential “taking” of anyone’s intellectual property rights.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 1:00 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under capitol hill, copyright law, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.