Lessig Concerned About House Bill

Larry Lessig has written a blog post about a piece of U.S. legislation called the “Fair Copyright in Research Act,” which would prevent organizations that receive government funds for research from mandating open access. Unsurprisingly, Lessig is opposed to the bill, and says:

Pushed by scientists everywhere, the NIH and other government agencies were increasingly exploring this obviously better model for spreading knowledge. Proprietary publishers, however, didn’t like it. And so rather than competing in the traditional way, they’ve adopted the increasingly Washington way of competition — they’ve gone to Congress to get a law to ban the business model they don’t like. If H.R. 801 is passed, the government can’t even experiment with supporting publishing models that assure that the people who have paid for the research can actually access it. Instead, if Conyers has his way, we’ll pay for the research twice.