…THE ALLIANCE FOR TAXPAYER ACCESS RESPONDS TO APS
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a response challenging the conclusions drawn by the American Physiological Society and its outside counsel on the legality of the proposed NIH OA plan. Excerpt from the ATA response: ‘Legal scholars advising the Alliance for Taxpayer Access quickly dismissed the faulty analysis made by the American Physiological Society’s outside counsel suggesting the National Institutes of Health’s public access plan will infringe copyright claims of grantees and publishers. (The claims were included in the APS comments filed with the NIH this week.) In rebuttal, intellectual property expert Michael Carroll stressed that the NIH proposed policy is "completely consistent with the scope of NIH’s license and mission," and labeled the APS analysis a "fatally flawed house of cards."…Carroll is an expert on intellectual property and Internet law, and teaches on the law faculty at Villanova University School of Law. According to Professor Carroll, "The publishers acknowledge that NIH has always had license to reproduce, publish and archive the research results that it has paid for. It is explicit; there is no question about that. Their analysis is built on the false premise that NIH is making a change to copyright law. The fact is, in all cases, NIH grantees must give NIH a royalty-free, nonexclusive, and irrevocable license for the Federal government to ‘reproduce, publish, or otherwise use’ the material and to authorize others to do so for Federal purpose. Nothing in this proposal alters the terms of NIH’s license and consequently, copyright law is not an obstacle for the NIH to move forward."
Open Access News, Nov. 21, 2004 <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html>
