From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 8:24 AM

In the past couple of days I have reported on the decisions by MIT Press,
ITHAKA and Pennsylvania State University Press to distance themselves from
the Research Works Act (RWA), otherwise known as HR 3699.

All three organisations are members of the Association of American
Publishers (AAP), which backs the RWA, and has described the bill as
“significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in
scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the
critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

If passed, however, the RWA would be a major setback for the Open Access
movement, since it would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced by the
US National Institutes of Health (NIH) requiring that all NIH-funded
research is made freely accessible online, and it would prevent other
federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on researchers.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the AAP has become the target for a lot  of
criticism, with the research community calling on members of the association
to disavow both the bill and AAP’s support for it. There have also been
calls for AAP members to resign in protest.

However, it is not currently clear how representative the views of MIT
Press, ITHAKA and Pennsylvania State University Press are. In an attempt to
find out I have over the past week or so contacted around 35 members of the
AAP, primarily scholarly publishers.

http://poynder.blogspot.com/2012/01/can-aap-members-stay-neutral-in-row.html

Richard Poynger