RE: New US Bill re. Copyright/Federal Funding

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

I don't question the right of the federal government to make use 
of the research it funds for the benefit of the public. But why, 
then, don't government agencies simply insist that any 
researchers they support provide a report at the end of the grant 
period that lays out the results of the research in a form that 
the agencies will find most useful for their purposes?  It seems 
to me that such a report serves a different function from an 
article published in a professional journal. This would mean that 
the researcher would need to prepare both a report and an 
article. But there would no doubt be some significant overlap in 
content, though the article could differ sufficiently in its 
expression to ground a claim of copyright that would serve to 
protect the publisher's investment in supporting the peer-review 
process and providing other value added. The federal agency could 
conduct its own type of quality control (i.e., its own form of 
"peer review") to ensure that the report met its own standards 
and satisfied the requirements of the grant. Once this review was 
completed, it could post the report online immediately for free 
access to the public (in contrast with the delayed release that 
the NIH policy mandates), thus serving the needs of the public 
for free and timely access to the information contained in the 
report. The publication of the article would follow its own 
separate process and time-line, conforming to the requirements of 
the publisher and the needs of the academic community. In short, 
it seems to me that there is a way to cut this Gordian knot that 
the NIH policy seems to have become, owing to the tensions it 
embodies between the public interest in rapid dissemination of 
government-funded research and the private interest in asserting 
copyright to protect a significant financial investment beyond 
what the government funds directly.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

P.S. There is an analogy, perhaps, with the difference between 
the dissertation and a book based on it. The dissertation has a 
specific, limited purpose. The book has a quite different, 
broader purpose. The audiences for the two are rather different. 
At present, many dissertations are released OA through the NDLTD 
and thus made available widely. Publishers who invest time and 
money in the process of publishing a book based on a dissertation 
may reasonably expect copyright to function as protection for 
that investment.