Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Conyers Fights NIH Internet Mandate

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers late Tuesday introduced legislation that would overturn a recent mandate that the National Institutes of Health require federally supported scientists to submit their research manuscripts for free public access on the Internet. The requirement passed as part of the fiscal year 2008 Labor-Health and Human Services appropriations bill without allowing input by committees with expertise and oversight on copyright. The bill is co-sponsored by Reps. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., Trent Franks, R-Ariz., Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Robert Wexler, D-Fla.

Last September, Conyers slammed the powerful House Appropriations Committee for not consulting with his panel (see CongressDaily story). "We have tried to communicate repeatedly with the leader of that committee ... and what did we get? Nothing," Conyers said at a hearing of the Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee. He said he viewed the silence as a blow-off by Appropriations Chairman David Obey and said he was frustrated that appropriators ran roughshod over the "sacred jurisdiction" of his committee to act "summarily, unilaterally and probably incorrectly."

Open access and consumer advocates championed the NIH's new requirement while publishers panned it, arguing that it could put subscription-based scientific journals out of business. "The mere fact that a scientist accepts as part of her funding a federal grant should not enable the federal government to commandeer the resulting peer-reviewed research paper and treat it as a public domain work," Copyright Alliance Executive Director Patrick Ross said in a Wednesday statement. "Grants are provided to pay for the research and resulting data... But taking the scientist's copyrighted interpretation of the data is not fair to other funders, and it violates the rights of the publisher."