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.
