SPARC has issued a call to action for the California Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act (AB 609).

Here's an excerpt:

The California Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Legislation (AB 609) was introduced into the California State Legislature in April of 2013 by Assembly Member Brian Nestande. On May 30th, AB 609 was passed by the California State Assembly by a wide, bipartisan 71-7 margin. It will be heard in the California State Senate Committee on Governmental Organization on Tuesday, May 25th at 9:30am PST.

If you are a California resident, visit our Legislative Action Center to write your state representatives in support of AB 609.

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The Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and the Association of Research Libraries have released "Expanded Public Access: A New Era with New Challenges."

Here's an excerpt:

During a short six-month period, agencies will develop draft plans for how this long-term preservation and access will occur ["Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research"]. Research universities have a significant stake in the plans the Director ultimately approves—universities are responsible to federal research funding agencies for compliance with the regulations attendant to the grants received by their researchers. If we are faced with different deposit requirements for manuscripts and data by each of the 15 and possibly more agencies subject to the directive, the compliance bill could be very expensive and might not reflect the interests of the academy. Given that PubMed Central has established a useful model for deposit of and access to research manuscripts, we can hope that the example of good practice established by them will be drawn upon by other funding agencies as they establish their own public access policies, and that the resultant products interconnect across and between agencies and external stakeholders that promote effective, seamless public access.

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The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research bill has been introduced in the House and the Senate.

Here's an excerpt from Peter Suber's analysis how the bill compares to the Federal Research Public Access Act :

Here's how FASTR differs from FRPAA:

• FASTR contains a provision on coordinating agency policies (4.a 2): "To the extent practicable, Federal agencies required to develop a policy…shall follow common procedures for the collection and depositing of research papers." This will reduce the burden on universities that need to comply with procedures at all the covered agencies, and should have no detrimental effect on OA. Indeed, it should improve compliance with agency OA policies.
• FASTR contains three provisions calling for libre OA or open licensing:
• • FASTR includes a new "finding" in its preamble (2.3): "the United States has a substantial interest in maximizing the impact and utility of the research it funds by enabling a wide range of reuses of the peer-reviewed literature that reports the results of such research, including by enabling computational analysis by state-of-the-art technologies."
  • FASTR includes a formatting and licensing provision (4.b.5): the versions deposited in repositories and made OA shall be distributed "in formats and under terms that enable productive reuse, including computational analysis by state-of-the-art technologies."
  • FASTR requires that the annual report from each covered agency include a statement from the agency on "whether the terms of use applicable to such research papers are effective in enabling productive reuse and computational analysis by state-of-the-art technologies" (4.f.2.B.i) and the results of the agency's "examination of whether such research papers should include a royalty-free copyright license that is available to the public and that permits the reuse of those research papers, on the condition that attribution is given to the author or authors of the research and any others designated by the copyright owner" (4.f.2.B.ii).

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a call to action to support the bill.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography (paperback, PDF file, and XHTML website; over 1,100 entries) | Digital Scholarship |

Sean M. Flynn et al. have self-archived "The U.S. Proposal for an Intellectual Property Chapter in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

Our ultimate conclusion is that the U.S. proposal, if adopted, would upset the current international framework balancing the interests of rights holders and the public. It would heighten standards of protection for rights holders well beyond that which the best available evidence or inclusive democratic processes support. It contains insufficient balancing provisions for users, consumers, and the public interest.

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Martin Hall has published "Green or Gold? Open Access after Finch" in the latest issue of Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

he Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings reported to the UK's Minister of Universities and Science in mid-2012. This was followed by a new policy for open access (OA) publishing by Research Councils UK (RCUK) as well as a commitment from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to require that research submitted to future research evaluation exercises—after the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF)—be open access. These initiatives build on a broad consensus, that includes for-profit publishers, that open access is the way of the future. Here, I give a perspective on these issues, both as the head of an institution with particular interests in the future of scholarly publication and also as a member of the Working Group on Expanding Access. The continuing development of informed debate will be critical for the future of the scholarly publishing system.

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Walt Crawford has published "The Rapid Rout of RWA" in the latest issue of Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt:

Seven weeks—from January 5, 2012 to February 27, 2012. That's all it took to get from AAP/PSP endorsing HR 3699, the Research Works Act, to Elsevier withdrawing its support and the bill disappearing. By today's legislative standards, it was all over before it started and scarcely worthy of a story here (except maybe a paragraph in The Back).

But it's not that simple, and I'd like to believe it's not really over—that this rapid rout is one in a series of events that will eventually change the landscape of scholarly publishing for the better. That makes the story worth telling. Well, that and my personal sense that it leads into a story that's not directly related but has similar resonances.

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The Research Councils UK has announced its open access funding plan.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Research Councils UK has today, 8th November, announced the details of the block grant funding mechanism that it is introducing to aid implementation of its policy on Open Access that was announced in July and is due to come into effect in April 2013. . . .

In the first year (2013/14), RCUK will provide funding to enable around 45% of Research Council funded research papers to be published using Gold Open Access growing to over 50% in the second year. By the fifth year (2017/18) funding is expected to be provided to enable approximately 75% of Research Council funded research papers to be published using Gold Open Access. The remaining 25% of Research Council funded papers, it is expected will be delivered via the Green Open Access model. The same compliance expectation applies to Research Council institutes, and separate funding arrangements are being put in place to facilitate this.

Universities will receive APC publication funding in proportion to the amount of direct labour costs awarded on grants that they have received over the three years from April 2009 to March 2012. Direct labour costs have been used as a proxy of research effort leading to the generation of publications.

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The Association of Research Libraries has released the Report of the ARL Joint Task Force on Services to Patrons with Print Disabilities.

Here's an excerpt from:

This ARL task force report highlights emerging and promising strategies to better align research libraries with other institutional and related partners in ensuring accessibility to research resources while fully meeting legal requirements. The report addresses the technological, service, and legal factors relating to a variety of information resources with respect to print disability. These factors resonate closely with the existing research library agenda to make scholarly communication more open, to foster independence among its user base by teaching information literacy, to honor and invest in diversity, as well as to focus on the growing trend toward universal design in instruction.

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The European Parliament has passed an orphan works bill.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Under the new rules, a work would be deemed to be "orphan" if a "diligent" search made in good faith failed to identify or locate the copyright holder. The legislation lays down criteria for carrying out such searches.

Works granted orphan status would be then be made public, for non-profit purposes only, through digitisation. A work deemed to be "orphan" in any one Member State would then qualify as "orphan" throughout the EU. This would apply to any audiovisual or printed material, including a photograph or an illustration embedded in a book, published or broadcast in any EU country.

MEPs agreed that the right holder should be entitled to put an end to the orphan status of a work at any time and claim appropriate compensation for the use made of it.

They nonetheless inserted a provision to protect public institutions from the risk of having to pay large sums to authors who show up later.

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The Justice Department and the National Federation of the Blind have reached a settlement with the Sacramento Public Library about alleged ADA violations in its e-reader loan program.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Justice Department announced today that it and the National Federation of the Blind have reached a settlement with the Sacramento Public Library Authority in Sacramento, Calif., to remedy alleged violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The agreement resolves allegations that the library violated the ADA by using inaccessible Barnes & Noble NOOK electronic reader devices in a patron lending program.

Under the settlement agreement, the library will not acquire any additional e-readers for patron use that exclude persons who are blind or others with disabilities who need accessible features such as text-to-speech functions or the ability to access menus through audio or tactile options. The library has also agreed to acquire at least 18 e-readers that are accessible to persons with disabilities. The settlement agreement also requires the library to train its staff on the requirements of the ADA.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

Five research councils in Denmark (the Danish Council for Technology and Innovation, the Danish Council for Independent Research, the Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation, the The Danish National Research Foundation, and the Danish Council for Strategic Research) have adopted an open access policy.

Peter Suber has provided a Google translation of the policy.

Read more about it at "Researchers' Results to Be Free for All."

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

The American Library Association has issued an action alert regarding the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act of 2011.

Here's an excerpt:

Please call and ask your U.S. Representative to OPPOSE H.R. 3523, The Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 or CISPA, one of several bills to be considered in the U.S. House of Representatives during "Cybersecurity Week" starting April 23, 2012.

ALA is concerned that essentially all private electronic communications could be obtained by the government and used for many purposes—and not just for cybersecurity activities. H.R. 3523 would permit, even require ISPs and other entities to monitor all electronic communications and share personal information with the government without effective oversight just by claiming the sharing is for "cybersecurity purposes"

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