The Research Works Act

Summary

 

The purpose of this Act is to support the continued investment and innovation by private-sector publishers in scientific, technical, medical and scholarly journal articles and to advance the public interest in the important peer-review publishing system that helps ensure the quality and integrity of scientific research. The legislation will prohibit federal agencies from adopting policies or engaging in activities that would result in the dissemination of private-sector journal articles that report on research funded by the government, unless the agency receives the prior consent of the publisher. It will also prevent federal agencies from requiring that a non-government author assent to the government dissemination of a private-sector journal article. The prohibition will only apply to journal articles to which a commercial or non-profit publisher has made a value-added contribution, such as peer review or editing.

 

This legislation will not apply to progress reports or raw data outputs routinely submitted by the researchers to the funding agencies, or to articles authored by employees of the federal government. It will only apply where a publisher of an article is not a party to a government funding agreement connected to the research but will not limit the ability of agencies to secure assent to agency dissemination from the publisher of the article under mutually agreeable terms. The legislation does not mandate or preclude any conventional, open access, or other business model the parties may choose voluntarily to employ.

 

Why this Legislation is Necessary

 

This Act will prevent the unauthorized dissemination of private-sector journal articles by the government that would harm commercial and non-profit publishers who invest significant resources in these private-sector information products. This Act will preserve the important underpinning of the scientific and scholarly process from unnecessary, burdensome and wasteful government action that would diminish the demand for private-sector information products and unfairly compete with private-sector publishers.

 

This legislation is necessary to prevent harmful government mandates such as the policy adopted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Under that policy, peer-reviewed manuscripts of private-sector journal articles must be submitted to NIH to be made freely available online no later than 12 months after publication. NIH specifically requires submission of the final manuscript only after the manuscript has passed through the publisher’s quality assurance peer-review processes and determination of acceptability for publication, even though the journal publisher is not a party to the funding agreement for the research.

 

This legislation seeks to ensure freedom from regulatory interference for private-sector research publications. For over a century, free market dynamics have provided the incentive for publishers to invest in the peer-review of research prior to publication and in the infrastructure necessary to publish and distribute scientific journal articles about the latest government-funded research. Publishers have depended on this system to invest and innovate in managing peer review, editing, publishing, disseminating and archiving these works that have aided in the advancement and integrity of science and contributed to substantial gains in scientific, technical, medical and scholarly research and knowledge. While the government may have funded the research or some portion of it, it did not fund the publication of the value-added journal articles produced by the private-sector. Therefore, the government should not be permitted to disseminate these private-sector products without the prior consent of the publisher.