George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School

IP Scholars File Comments with OSTP on Public Access to Scholarly Publications

shelves full of booksA group of intellectual property scholars filed comments yesterday with the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), asking it to forgo its plans to make all federally-funded scholarly publications free and open to the public upon initial publication. The comments were submitted in response to a notice of Request for Information (RFI) that was published in the Federal Register seeking recommendations “on approaches for ensuring broad public access to the peer-reviewed scholarly publications, data, and code that result from federally funded scientific research.” Read more

Proposed Open Access Regulation is a Solution in Search of a Problem

a lightbulb shatteringEarlier this week, a coalition of over 125 publishers and non-profit scientific societies joined the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in a letter to the White House expressing serious concerns with a proposed Administration policy that would override intellectual property rights and threaten the advancement of scientific scholarship and innovation. Read more

New CPIP Policy Brief: Open-Access Mandates and the Seductively False Promise of “Free”

the word "copyright" typed on a typewriterCPIP has published a new policy brief entitled Open-Access Mandates and the Seductively False Promise of “Free.” The brief, written by CPIP Legal Fellow Bhamati Viswanathan and CPIP Director of Academic Programs & Senior Scholar Adam Mossoff, exposes the lack of evidence or justification for the proliferating legal mandates by federal agencies that coerce authors and publishers to make their scholarly articles available for free to the world. Read more

How Copyright Drives Innovation in Scholarly Publishing

[Cross posted at Truth on the Market]

Today’s public policy debates frame copyright policy solely in terms of a “trade off” between the benefits of incentivizing new works and the social deadweight losses imposed by the access restrictions imposed by these (temporary) “monopolies.” Read more