Research Works Act (RWA)

See the following -

A Victory for Open Access

Staff Writer | The Hindu | May 2, 2012

Harvard University's decision to ask faculty members to make their papers available in the university's open-access repository and choose open-access journals or those with reasonable subscription costs is a sign that the movement for affordable research is gaining ground. Read More »

Academic Publishers Have Become The Enemies Of Science

Mike Taylor | The Guardian | January 16, 2012

The US Research Works Act would allow publishers to line their pockets by locking publicly funded research behind paywalls Read More »

An Academic Spring?

Barbara Fister | American Libraries Magazine | April 4, 2012

A successful protest against Elsevier demonstrates that populist rebellions have a place within the information-sharing community. Read More »

Elsevier Backs Down, Removes Support for Research Works Act as Elsevier Boycott Grows

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | February 27, 2012

While it never got as much attention as the GoDaddy boycott, it appears the growing boycott of academics, refusing to publish papers in any Reed Elsevier journal, has caused the company to back down. It has now announced that it no longer supports the Research Works Act. Read More »

Elsevier Backs Off RWA Support; Still Opposes Mandated Open Access

Meredith Schwartz | Library Journal | February 27, 2012

Scientific journal publisher Elsevier today withdrew its support for the Research Works Act (RWA), a bill which would have prohibited open access mandates for federally funded research. The publisher had been the target of a boycott among academics, as LJ reported. At press time, 7,486 researchers had pledged not to publish, referee or do editorial work for Elsevier’s journals. Read More »

Elsevier Blinks, Will No Longer Support Research Works Act

Mark Hoofnagle | ScienceBlogs | February 27, 2012

In a victory for science, and those who favor open access for the easy dissemination of scientific results to the public and scientists around the world, Elsevier has withdrawn support for the Research Works Act. Read More »

Half Of Taxpayer Funded Research Will Soon Be Available To The Public

Andrea Peterson | Washington Post | January 17, 2014

Proponents of the open access model for academic research notched a huge victory Thursday night when Congress passed a budget that will make about half of taxpayer-funded research available to the public. Read More »

Information Needed to Treat Put Beyond Physicians' Reach: Free Online Access to Medical Journal Articles Must Be the Norm

P. Logan Weygandt | The Baltimore Sun | April 29, 2012

Thanks to the diligence of so many students, scientists, clinicians and public supporters of free and open access to research, FRPAA has been reintroduced, and the RWA has been thwarted, at least for now. These proponents of open access refused to accept that in this digital age, clinicians should be so removed from the data providing the foundation for evidence-based practice...Our voice has been heard, but the fight rages on. Read More »

ISCB Response to Research Works Act HR-3699

Scott Markel, Richard Lathrop, and Burkhard Rost | International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) | February 14, 2012

On February 14, 2012, the following letter was personalized to each of the 39 members of the US House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee and successfully sent via fax to their congressional offices.

Read More »

Life After Elsevier: Making Open Access to Scientific Knowledge a Reality

Tyler Neylon | The Guardian | April 24, 2012

Academic publishing is in the midst of an upheaval. The internet has transformed the ability to disseminate knowledge, a capacity once exclusive to publishers. Despite this, the exorbitant profit margins of academic publishers – who often do not pay their authors, editors and reviewers – continue to grow unchecked while library budgets shrink as a percentage of university spending. Read More »

One Size Fits All?: Social Science And Open Access

David Mainwaring | The Disorder of Things | November 14, 2012

The third post in our small series on open access, publication shifts on the horizon and how it all matters to IR and social science, this time by David Mainwaring [...]. Read More »

Open Access Advocates Protest The FIRST Act

Sal Robinson | Melville House | November 18, 2013

When, in February 2013, the White House issued a directive stating that all larger federal agencies (agencies that spent over $100 million R&D annually) should make the results of any federally funded research available to the public within a year of publication, Open Access advocates cheered. [...] However, a new bill [...] now threatens to reverse the progress made earlier in the year. Read More »

Open Access Meeting Reflections—SPARC 2012

Abby Clobridge | Information Today, Inc | March 26, 2012

Ten years after the movement was launched through the Budapest Open Access Initiative, open access (OA) is thriving, flourishing, and becoming a core element in the broader “Open Knowledge” movement that includes Open Educational Resources (OER), Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), Open Data, and Open Science among others, all of which share the common goals of providing free, unrestricted access to different types of information and knowledge. Read More »

Open Access To Science Helps Us All

Dave Carr and Robert Kiley | New Statesman | April 13, 2012

[...] However, in recent years there has been a growing recognition that the traditional subscription-based access models are not serving the best interests of the research community, and a growing movement to support open-access publishing – in which research papers are freely available to all at the point of use. Read More »

Open Access: What Every Researcher Should Know

Staff Writer | Scholarly Commons | December 10, 2012

Recently, a movement has grown up around the issue of open access to scholarly research. It’s likely that the debate surrounding this movement will have a profound effect on how the web is used for scholarly communications in the future. Read More »