RUP’s Mike Rossner: Doing what’s right

Scholarly publishing is going through some hectic times. At the beginning of the year it was engulfed in the controversy over the Research Works Act (RWA), which would have rolled back the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005, and forbidden other federal agencies from introducing similar policies.

Mike Rossner

Confronted by an outcry from the research community, publishers began to distance themselves from the act, or they dithered, and the saga ended in a big win for the Open Access (OA) movement.

Hot on the heels of the RWA comes the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). This would achieve the very opposite of the RWA: It would strengthen the NIH Policy by reducing the embargo period before research papers must be made freely available online, from 12 months to six months; and it would require that all the major agencies of the federal government introduce the new strengthened policy.

Right now the FRPAA is still alive and kicking, but under attack from publishers, who have described it as “little more than an attempt at intellectual eminent domain, but without fair compensation to authors and publishers.”

As the war of words between OA advocates and publishers begins anew, one publisher stands out for taking an independent line — the executive director of Rockefeller University Press (RUP) Mike Rossner. In fact, this is not the first time that Rossner has disagreed with other publishers (e.g. see here, here and here), but it is always refreshing (not to say liberating) when one witnesses individuals standing out from the crowd.

True to form, Rossner has released a letter to librarians outlining his position in the current debate. Yesterday he forwarded the letter to me and invited me to share it, which I am happy to do. As I felt the letter invited a few questions I put those to Rossner first. The short Q&A can be read below the letter.

I am reminded of what Rossner told SPARC in 2009, when he was honoured as a SPARC Innovator: “I don’t see myself as going against the grain, I see myself as doing what’s right.”

What is undeniable is that if all scholarly publishers approached the world in the way that Mike Rossner does, a great many more research papers would be freely accessible on the Web today!

Dear Librarian,

I am writing to clarify the position of The Rockefeller University Press (RUP) on various legislative efforts regarding public access to publications resulting from federally funded research. RUP is a member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), who have both recently provided position statements on this issue. However, RUP does not agree with those statements.

RUP is a subscription-based publisher that publishes three biomedical research journals: The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine, and The Journal of General Physiology. We have released our back content to the public since 2001 – long before any federal mandates existed – because we believe we have an obligation to give something back to the public that funds the research we publish.

The AAP supported the now-defunct Research Works Act. RUP strongly opposed that act.

Both the AAP and AAUP have opposed the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which has been re-introduced into both the House and Senate. Although numerous non-profit publishers signed the AAP letter, the RUP does not stand with those publishers. RUP supports FRPAA in principle.  We know from the NIH public access policy that mandated access to the results of federally-funded research is necessary to get certain publishers to release this content to the public, and we support legislation to extend the NIH policy to other large federal funding agencies.

The AAP and AAUP use a one-size-does-not-fit-all argument to oppose FRPAA because the drafted legislation calls for all large federal agencies to mandate public access six months after publication. Although it can be argued that a six-month embargo period may not be suitable for all disciplines covered by FRPAA, this is not grounds to oppose the legislation altogether. It should be supported in principle and could be modified during Congressional review to provide the flexibility for each agency to choose its own embargo period.

The continuing rhetoric from the AAP and AAUP about having ongoing "conversations" about access to the results of publicly funded research is outdated. There is legislation on the table that will help to make public access a reality now.

Yours sincerely,

Mike Rossner
Executive Director

These comments are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Rockefeller University.

Q&A:

RP:  I note that what you have sent me is a letter addressed to librarians. Can you say what your message is to RUP authors and readers?

MR: The note was addressed to librarians because it was sent to our list of institutional site managers. Our message is the same to RUP authors and readers.

RP:  You perhaps saw Stevan Harnad’s response to your letter? I know the term “public access” is widely used in the US, but has Stevan got a point? While members of the public clearly have an interest in ensuring that their tax dollars are spent effectively, is not the benefit of open access that it enables researchers to access each other’s papers, not that it allows the public to read them? Do you think these two issues are sometimes conflated?

MR: Stevan distinguished researcher access from public access. Since we release all of our back content to the public, the two are functionally equivalent from our perspective.

RP:  Would it be fair to conclude you feel that both the AAP and AAUP have lost sight of the big picture so far as scholarly communication is concerned, and that they can no longer see the wood for the trees when it comes to the issue of OA?

MR: I cannot speak to the perspectives of those organizations. I imagine that they believe their positions represent the opinions of the majority of their members, although I have not seen any polling data to this effect.

RP:  Given the apparent gulf that has opened up between RUP and both the AAP and AAUP, I am wondering what value there is in RUP remaining a member. Why does RUP not resign from these two organisations?

MR: I believe that there is value in presenting a dissenting opinion from within an organization. Being a member gives me a voice over communications networks to which I would otherwise not have access.

RP:  You say that RUP supports the FRPAA “in principle”. Can you say more about the reservations RUP has about the bill, which perhaps encompass more than the embargo period alone?

MR: My reservations encompass only the uniform embargo period. I strongly support the principle of mandated public access.

Open Access, brick by brick

Last month Elsevier withdrew its support for the controversial Research Works Act (RWA). Had it become law, the RWA would have rolled back the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy requiring that funded researchers make their papers freely available on the Web within 12 months of publication. It would also have outlawed other US federal agencies from introducing similar policies. As such, the bill was a direct assault on Green Open Access. But while Elsevier’s retreat was a big win for supporters of Open Access (OA), OA will continue to be a brick-by-brick process — as evidenced by recent events in Australia.

In stepping away from the RWA, Elsevier acknowledged that it had made a strategic mistake. It clearly also made a serious PR gaffe. Whether the company has done lasting damage to its relationship with the research community remains uncertain, but the fact that researchers are continuing to sign up to the boycott Elsevier web site — created in protest at the publisher’s support for the bill — must clearly be a cause for concern.

What the RWA fiasco underlines is that while publishers are increasingly willing to embrace Gold OA (OA publishing), their antipathy towards Green OA (self-archiving) is growing, particularly where it is mandatory.

For that reason, Elsevier’s decision should be viewed as a political act alone, not a change of heart. Indeed, in announcing its withdrawal the publisher stressed that it remains firmly opposed to OA mandates.

Moreover, while OA advocates maintain that most publishers are now comfortable with the NIH policy this is surely only wish fulfilment. A week after the RWA died, after all, 81 publishers signed a letter opposing the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA).

Introduced into both the US Senate and the House of Representatives on 9^th February, far from outlawing the NIH policy, the FRPAA would propagate it — to around a dozen other US federal agencies. It would also reduce the embargo period from 12 months to six. As such, the bill would be a huge fillip for Green OA — although with the US elections approaching it seems highly unlikely to succeed, in the near future at least.

In short, the battle for OA goes on, but looks set to be fought primarily over Green OA henceforward.

Down under

Recent events on the other side of the globe would appear to confirm this. They also demonstrate that while the OA movement was victorious in the battle over the RWA, the war itself is far from over.

In a development generally under-reported outside Australia (pushed aside by the hubbub over the RWA perhaps), on 21st February the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) announced that it plans to introduce an NIH-style mandate — effective July 1st.

Scholarly Publishing: Where is Plan B?

To the intense joy of Open Access (OA) advocates, Elsevier announced Monday that it has withdrawn its support for the controversial US Research Works Act (RWA). Shortly afterwards, it was reported that the two sponsors of the bill — Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) — would not be “taking legislative action” on the RWA. In short, the bill is now dead on its feet.

One person who took particular note of the news was Claudio Aspesi, a senior research analyst at the sell-side research firm Sanford Bernstein. Aspesi tracks Elsevier for investors, so on Tuesday he published a new report on the company. While welcoming Elsevier's decision, Aspesi concluded, “Consensus is still treating Elsevier’s problems as cyclical, in spite of the rising evidence the issues are deeper”. So when I received a copy of the report I took it as a sign that it was time to re-interview Aspesi. The interview follows my own thoughts on the current situation below.

Claudio Aspesi

The RWA was introduced into the House of Representatives at the end of last year. Had it become law, the bill would have reversed the 2005 National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy requiring that taxpayer-funded research is made freely accessible online within 12 months of publication. It would also have prevented other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on their funded researchers.

In short, the RWA would have been a serious setback for the OA movement. But the danger has been averted.

Sadly for Elsevier, however, its flirtation with the RWA appears to have wreaked havoc on its relationship with the research community. The blogosphere has been alive with criticism of the publisher, several petitions were launched to stop the bill and, most damagingly, in January a blog post by highly regarded Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers sparked a boycott of the company, with thousands of researchers pledging that henceforth they will not publish in, or referee and/or perform editorial services for any Elsevier journals.

It is important to note, however, that this anger was not just over Elsevier’s support for the RWA. It was soon apparent that researchers have a number of historic grievances against the company, grievances that were reawakened by its support for the bill.

The boycott site (Cost of Knowledge) lists a number of these grievances, including the complaint that Elsevier charges “exorbitantly high prices” and that it has used the Big Deal (aka journal bundling) as a way of forcing librarians to “agree to buy very large ‘bundles’” of journals, including “many journals that those libraries do not actually want.”

As such, the danger is that having opened Pandora’s Box, Elsevier may not be able to close it again, and its retreat from the RWA may fail to stem the tide of researchers joining the boycott. At the time of writing, the number who had pledged to shun the publisher had grown to 7,690, and continues to grow by the hour.

Given the PR crisis it sparked, and the embarrassing climb-down that Elsevier has had to make, one is bound to wonder why the publisher ever supported the RWA in the first place.

Ask Elsevier why and it will tell you that self-archiving mandates like the NIH policy represent an unfair threat to its business — by depriving it of vital subscription revenue it needs to fund the publishing of research papers. It also claims that the NIH policy amounts to unwarranted government interference in the market.

But is it true that self-archiving mandates inevitably cause libraries to cancel subscriptions, as Elsevier claims? This is far from self-evident.

Elsevier steps away from Research Works Act

Elsevier has today posted a statement on its web site indicating that it no longer supports the Research Works Act (RWA). 

Michael Eisen design

The news follows an outcry against the publisher for supporting the bill, and the launch of a site encouraging researchers to commit to boycott Elsevier. Currently the number of researchers who have signed on to the boycott is approaching 7,500.

I attach some excerpts from Elsevier's statement below:

At Elsevier, we have always focused on serving the global research community and ensuring the best possible access to research publications and data. In recent weeks, our support for the Research Works Act has caused some in the community to question that commitment.

We have heard expressions of support from publishers and scholarly societies for the principle behind the legislation. However, we have also heard from some Elsevier journal authors, editors and reviewers who were concerned that the Act seemed inconsistent with Elsevier’s long-standing support for expanding options for free and low-cost public access to scholarly literature. That was certainly not our intention in supporting it. This perception runs counter to our commitment to making published research widely accessible, coming at a time when we continue to expand our access options for authors and develop advanced technologies to enable the sharing and distribution of research results.
... 

While we continue to oppose government mandates in this area, Elsevier is withdrawing support for the Research Work Act itself. We hope this will address some of the concerns expressed and help create a less heated and more productive climate for our ongoing discussions with research funders.
... 

"We are ready and willing to work constructively and cooperatively to continue to promote free and low-cost public access through a variety of means, as we have with research funders and other partners around the world.

The full statement can be read here.

UPDATE: Elsevier has today also published a Letter to the Mathematics Community. Amongst other things, this addresses the issues of pricing, open access and the RWA.

FURTHER UPDATE: Elsevier's vice president marketing communications Chrysanne Lowe has posted a message to the library community on the Liblicense mailing list.

The message confirms that Elsevier has withdrawn its support for the RWA, and ends, "We recognize that the recent legislative debate is far from the only issue at hand. We acknowledge that, as the largest of the commercial publishers, we take a sizable share of your serials budget. However, relative to our competitors, we are also confident that we deliver a significant share of value in terms of articles, usage, citations, and improved research productivity."

FURTHER UPDATE:  Alexander Howard reports that he has received a joint statement from the sponsors of the RWA -- Reps. Darrell Issa and Carolyn B. Maloney -- saying that they "will not be taking legislative action" on the RWA. The statement adds:

As the costs of publishing continue to be driven down by new technology, we will continue to see a growth in open access publishers. This new and innovative model appears to be the wave of the future. The transition must be collaborative, and must respect copyright law and the principles of open access. The American people deserve to have access to research for which they have paid. This conversation needs to continue and we have come to the conclusion that the Research Works Act has exhausted the useful role it can play in the debate.

Back to Budapest

Ten years ago, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (then known as the Open Society Initiative) gathered together a group of people who believed passionately that publicly-funded research ought to be freely available on the Internet. 

Open Society Archives

It was a somewhat disparate group of people with varying interests and agendas. But over the course of two cold December days in Budapest, the group hammered out a common vision, and an agenda. This was then articulated in a public declaration — a declaration they called the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), and a declaration that  gave birth to the open-access (OA) movement.

The BOAI called for all publicly-funded research articles to be made freely available on the Internet, and in such a way that any user could “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.”

It also proposed two ways in which this objective could be met. First, by researchers self-archiving any papers they published in subscription journals on the Internet themselves (aka Green OA); second, by researchers opting to publish in open-access journals so that the publisher made their work freely availale online (aka Gold OA).

Thus was born the open-access movement, and a decade of heated advocacy, joyful successes, and sometimes bitter disappointments. In the process, OA has become both the hottest and the most controversial topic within the world of scholarly publishing.

As Open Society Foundations’ Melissa Hagemann put it recently, “Today, Open Access is at the forefront of discussions about scholarly communications in the digital age. Open Access  is taught in universities, debated in Parliaments, embraced and opposed by publishers, and most importantly, mandated by over 300 research funders and institutions, including the largest funder of research in the world, the U.S. National Institutes of Health.”

Hagemann added however, “[T]he fight for open access to research has not been won. The U.S. Congress is considering reversing the NIH mandate in a bill — the Research Works Act — backed by traditional publishers.”

Against this background, last week the Open Society Foundations once again gathered together a group of open-access advocates, along with a number of research funders, and asked them to agree on what they think needs to be done over the next ten years.

The event took the form of a roundtable discussion, with topics discussed including policy, sustainability, new metrics, and research re-use issues.

Once again held in Budapest, in the Open Society Archives, the discussion was chaired by Alma Swan, director of European advocacy at the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).

“The aim,” explains Swan, “was to agree a list of recommendations outlining where we think energy and funding would be best directed over the next ten years.”

The list of recommendations is expected to be published in the next few weeks. When it is, I hope to publish an interview with Alma Swan.

** The interview with Alma Swan is now available here **

The OA Interviews: Michael Eisen, co-founder of the Public Library of Science

Michael Eisen is an evolutionary biologist at University of California Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is also co-founder of the Open Access (OA) publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS).

Michael Eisen

Founded in 2000, PLoS was conceived as an advocacy group for what only later became known as Open Access. PLoS’ first initiative was to publish an Open Letter and invite scientists around the world to sign on to it.

Those signing pledged that henceforth they would “publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to only those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research reports that they have published, through PubMed Central and similar online public resources, within 6 months of their initial publication date.”

Nearly 34,000 scientists from 180 countries signed the pledge; but while a small handful of publishers complied with the demands outlined in the letter, most blithely ignored it. Worse, most of the scientist signatories proved happy to forswear their own pledge, and continue publishing in the very journals that had turned a deaf ear to them.

Disappointed but undeterred, Eisen and the other two PLoS co-founders — biochemist Patrick Brown, and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus — reinvented the organisation as a non-profit publisher, and in 2003 they launched an OA journal called PLoS Biology. PLoS Medicine followed a year later.

PLoS ONE

Today PLoS publishes seven OA journals and is also experimenting with new OA services like PLoS Currents, which aims to minimise the delay between the generation and publication of new research. Papers are published within days of being submitted.

PLoS was able to become a publisher thanks to a $9 million grant it received in 2002 from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The challenge was to become financially sustainable before the grant ran out.

With this aim in mind, PLoS decided to levy a one-off article-processing charge (APC) for each paper it published. This avoids having to charge a subscription to those who want to access PLoS papers. Instead, the publisher can make all the papers it publishes freely available on the Web. Later dubbed Gold OA, this approach was originally pioneered by commercial OA publisher BioMed Central (BMC).

Many were sceptical that such a model could work, and not without reason: PLoS initially struggled to pay its way. But in 2006 the publisher launched PLoS ONE, a new journal that was not only radical in concept, but was to prove a financial saviour.

PLoS ONE is revolutionary in two ways. First, where journals are normally discipline specific PLoS ONE will consider any paper in any discipline within the hard sciences. Second, reviewers are told only to assess the technical validity of papers submitted, not their likely scientific importance or significance.

It turned out to be a winning formula, and PLoS ONE grew so rapidly that it is now the largest peer-reviewed journal in the world. It has published over 31,000 papers since 2006, 14,000 of them in 2011 alone, which represents 1 in 60 of all the papers indexed by PubMed that year.

Importantly, thanks to PLoS ONE, the publisher was able to announce last year that its annual operating revenues in 2010 had exceeded expenses for the first time.

But success has not come without controversy. Critics accuse PLoS of engaging in “bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals.” By doing so, they add, it is lowering the quality of published research.

Undoubtedly, the acceptance bar is much lower at PLoS ONE than at other journals. Where The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine accept fewer than 10% of papers submitted, for instance, PLoS ONE publishes around 65% of the papers it receives.

However, as the potential financial benefits of the PLoS ONE model became evident, traditional commercial publishers rushed to create PLoS ONE clones themselves. Today, therefore, PLoS ONE is as likely to be celebrated for pioneering a new type of megajournal as it is to be criticised for its no-frills peer review.

John Wiley & Sons have no plans to endorse the Research Works Act

As opposition to the Research Works Act (RWA) grows, more and more scholarly publishers are distancing themselves from the proposed new bill. The latest is John Wiley & Sons.

Wiley has emailed me the following statement:

We do not believe that legislative initiatives are the best way forward at this time and so have no plans to endorse RWA. Instead we believe that research funder-publisher partnerships will be more productive.

Ongoing discussions with OSTP in the U.S., the Finch Group in the U.K. and research funders generally present an opportunity for research funders and publishers to work in partnership to develop tools to better identify, present and disseminate the results of publicly funded research — for example working together on initiatives to link published articles with funder information such as research reports, and finding new ways to manage and provide access to the rapidly expanding body of supporting research data as a critical reference tool for further scientific inquiry. At the same time, Wiley is actively exploring all sustainable business models for scholarly communication, including gold (funded) open access.

We believe this approach serves the interests of our diverse publishing partners (around 800 scholarly and professional societies), representing a broad range of opinion and policies on access.

Known formally as HR 3699, the RWA is a proposed new bill that would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced in 2005 by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The policy requires that taxpayer-funded research is made freely accessible in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central database within 12 months of publication.

The RWA would also prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar mandates on their funded researchers. As such, it poses a serious threat to the Open Access (OA) movement.

The RWA is backed by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and its Professional and Scholarly Division (PSP), which last December published a press release describing the bill as, “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

However, since the beginning of January a growing number of publishers have been distancing themselves from the bill, including members of the AAP itself. Amongst those to do so are MIT Press, Pennsylvania State University Press, Rockefeller University Press, University of California Press, Nature Publishing Group, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAA), publisher of the well-known scientific journal Science.  

John Wiley, we should note, is also a member of the AAP, and its technical, medical, and scholarly business Wiley-Blackwell is one of the larger scholarly publishers. Wiley Online Library offers online access to over 4 million articles from 1,500 journals, 9,000+ books, and many reference works and databases.

As the list of RWA dissenters grows, OA advocate Peter Suber has been keeping tabs on a wiki page he has created at Harvard’s Berkman Center. In a Google+ post yesterday, Suber reported that there are now “19 publisher opponents of RWA and 46 major non-publisher opponents.” John Wiley will take the number of dissenting publishers to 20.

Further bad news for RWA supporters came  yesterday, when it was announced that a new version of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) has been introduced into both the House and the Senate.

The FRPAA is the exact opposite of the RWA: Where the RWA would roll back the NIH Public Access Policy, the FRPAA would strengthen it — by reducing the maximum embargo period before published research papers have to be made freely available online from 12 months to six months.

And where the RWA would outlaw other US federal agencies from imposing NIH-like mandates on their funded researchers, the FRPAA would require all the major agencies of the federal government to introduce the new strengthened policy.

More on the FRPAA here.

The Battle of the Bills

As anger over the Research Works Act (RWA) continues to grow the open access (OA) movement has come up with the ultimate riposte — a new version of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA).

The FRPAA is the exact opposite of the RWA: Where the RWA would roll back the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005, the FRPAA would strengthen it — by reducing the maximum embargo period before published research papers have to be made freely available online from 12 months to six months.

And where the RWA would outlaw other US federal agencies from imposing NIH-like mandates on their funded researchers, the FRPAA would require all the major agencies of the federal government to introduce the new strengthened policy.

In a post on Google+, OA advocate Peter Suber reports that the new version of the FRPAA is expected to be introduced in both the House and the Senate today. 

The bipartisan House sponsors of the FRPAA are Mike Doyle (D-PA), Kevin Yoder (R-KS), and William Lacy Clay (D-MO), and the bipartisan Senate sponsors are John Cornyn (R-TX), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), and Ron Wyden (D-OR).

In a message posted today on his web site, Congressman Doyle is quoted as saying:

“Americans have the right to see the results of research funded with taxpayer dollars. Yet such research too often gets locked away behind a pay-wall, forcing those who want to learn from it to pay expensive subscription fees for access.

“The Federal Research Public Access Act will encourage broader collaboration among scholars in the scientific community by permitting widespread dissemination of research findings. Promoting greater collaboration will inevitably lead to more innovative research outcomes and more effective solutions in the fields of biomedicine, energy, education, and health care.”

For those wanting more information about the FRPAA, Suber has created a wiki page at Harvard’s Berkman Center. This explains the new bill and its implications in greater detail. 

UPDATE: The RWA has been defeated. 

Elsevier’s Alicia Wise on the RWA, the West Wing, and Universal Access

In recent years I have noticed that it is pretty difficult for journalists not attached to big media to obtain interviews with Elsevier executives — except where the purpose of the interview is to talk about a new product, or the company’s latest financial results. Certainly, Elsevier has appeared very reluctant to talk about Open Access (OA). 

This led me to conclude that the company believes it only needs to talk to two groups of people: its shareholders and its customers — where customer implies not the researchers whose papers provide the content published in its journals, but the librarians who purchase those journals, invariably by means of the controversial Big Deal (aka “bundling”).

All changed

Alicia Wise

If my conclusion was correct, it seems safe to say that this has all changed in the past month or so. And the reason why is clear: At the end of last year a new bill was introduced into the US House of Representatives called the Research Works Act (RWA).

Co-sponsored by Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), the RWA would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced in 2005 by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). This policy requires that taxpayer-funded research is made freely accessible online with 12 months of publication. The bill would also prevent any other federal agency from imposing a similar requirement on the researchers it funds. As such, the RWA would pose a significant threat to the Open Access movement.

Shortly after its introduction, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) — an organisation of which Elsevier is a senior member — published a press release welcoming the new bill. The RWA, it said, is “aimed at preventing regulatory interference with private-sector research publishers in the production, peer review and publication of scientific, medical, technical, humanities, legal and scholarly journal articles.”

However, the problem is that the research community views things rather differently, and so news of the bill quickly ignited a firestorm of protest, especially amongst OA advocates.