A new bill seeks to undo the NIH mandate requiring federally-funded research papers to be made publicly available within 12 months of acceptance for publication. In a hearing yesterday (September 11) the US House Committee on the Judiciary considered whether the mandate violates publishers' copyright. The committee's chairman, John Conyers (D-Mich), sponsored the bill, linkurl:HR6845, titled the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act,;http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.6845: which would prohibit federal agencies from requiring a transfer of copyright license for the paper resulting from federal funds. Under the current mandate, researchers give the NIH a non-exclusive license so that manuscripts can be deposited in PubMed Central. Without such a copyright license, the agency can't deposit final manuscripts into the PubMed database and all copyright is maintained, in most cases, by the publisher. The new legislation would "turn back the clock" by prohibiting the NIH from mandating public access as a condition of researchers receiving...
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