Well, much has been said recently about the ickyness of a new bill in Congress that is targeting open access publishing.
For more about how this new "Research Works Act" is a bad idea see
- Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research from my brother Michael Eisen
- Why Is Open-Internet Champion Darrell Issa Supporting an Attack on Open Science? from Rebecca Rosen at the Atlantic
- Peter Suber on Google Plus Yesterday New bill to block open access to publicly-funded research
- Tim O'Reilly on Google Plus: Regulatory Capture at Work
And many more.
I think a key aspect of this bill is the disturbing support for it from the The Association of American Publishers. Now, this association includes many you might expect to be in favor of an anti open access bill, like Elsevier and Disney and Wiley and Macmillan. But it also includes many publishers I would not have expected to see supporting this bill such as the University of California Press and MIT Press and there National Science Teachers Association The full list of members of AAP is here. I think it is clearly time for the Academic community to pressure groups to abandon AAP as suggested by John Dupais: Scholarly Societies: It's time to abandon the AAP over The Research Works Act
I therefore am calling on the academic and scientific communities to look at the list of members of AAP and if one of them is an institution with which you have any affiliation please call on them to drop themselves from the membership list. I will be doing this for the UC Press ASAP ...
UPDATE
Just discovered a similar but much more detailed call from Cameron Neylon.
UPDATE2
See my post from 2007 calling for a boycott of AAP over their inane "PRISM" effort
