New US Bill re. Copyright/Federal Funding

["Okerson, Ann" <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

The excerpt below comes from LJ Academic Newswire, September 
12th.  I'm having some difficulty understanding the full 
rationale behind this bill - apart from the intention to weaken 
the NIH (or other) deposit requirement.  I'm NOT a fan of 
mandates - though one of my former bosses used to proclaim: "s/he 
who has the gold makes the rules."

And I understand publishers' concerns; but how does this bill 
"protect the rights of *authors,*" who don't seem here to be 
complaining about a loss of rights?

Is there someone out in liblicense-l land who can provide a 
simple explanation?  Thank you, Ann Okerson

________________________________________

New Bill Would Forbid Copyright Transfer as a Condition for 
Federal Funding

The public access battle lines have been redrawn: if passed, the 
Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (HR 6845), now officially 
introduced, would essentially bar agencies of the federal 
government from requiring the transfer of copyright, whole or in 
part, as a condition for receiving public funding. The pending 
legislation was the subject of a congressional hearing today, as 
first reported by LJ late last week. The text of the brief, but 
sweeping copyright bill, first posted yesterday afternoon on the 
Public Knowledge blog, proposes that: "No Federal agency may, in 
connection with a funding agreement, impose or cause the 
imposition of any term or condition that requires the transfer or 
license to or for a Federal agency any right provided under 
copyright law."

That means, if passed, measures like the recently enacted NIH 
public access policy, which requires investigators who accept 
taxpayer funds to deposit their final papers in the PubMed 
Central repository and give the agency a non-exclusive right to 
offer free access within a year, would be prohibited. It was 
unclear, however, if the bill would directly affect the current 
NIH policy, as the bill appears to apply to future policies. In 
its first statement since LJ broke the news of the pending bill, 
introduced after months of heavy lobbying from publishers, 
officials at the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) 
Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) praised 
the measure as protecting "the rights of authors and publishers 
of copyrighted, peer-reviewed scientific journal articles." The 
NIH policy, the statement said, forced publishers to "surrender 
their peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, without 
compensation, for worldwide online distribution."

[SNIP]

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