The United States House of Representatives is currently debating a new bill, The
Research Works Act. This bill is supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Copyright Alliance, and opposed by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, the American Library Association, the International Society for Computational Biology, and prominent open science and open access advocates. If enacted, this bill will benefit publishers by putting significant limits on freely sharing US scientific research. If the Research Works Act is passed, then it is quite likely that we will see similar actions commenced by the Australian publishing industry. Limiting access to quality research via some kind of open access means (ie. University repositories or open access publishers like PubMed) can only diminish the quality of research produced across the globe.
For more news on this topic have a look at:
Academic publishers have become the enemies of science
A small bill in the US, a giant impact for research worldwide
The Research Works Act: A damaging threat to science
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