Talk about being right on target.

To: Bill Davis, Executive Director; Leith Mullings, AAA President,
From: SCA Executive Board
RE: Research Works Act (HR 3699)

On January 18, 2012, the SCA Executive Board voted UNANIMOUSLY to pass the following resolution:

On behalf of the SCA membership, the SCA Executive Board urges the American Anthropological Association to oppose the Research Works Act (HR 3699) introduced into Congress on December 19, 2011, and to distance itself from the endorsement of this legislation by the Association of American Publishers, of which AAA is a member.

The Research Works Act would repeal the open access policy of the National Institutes of Health, whereby publications produced with federal funding are made publicly available in a repository 12 months after their publication, and block similar policies at other federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation. Opposing the RWA does not entail a full embrace of open access philosophies; for-profit publishing is perfectly compatible with the current status quo. Opposing the RWA does not entail renouncing membership in the AAP; a number of AAP members have distanced themselves from the AAP position on RWA but continue to affirm their relationship.

Indeed, a number of AAP members have spoken out against the RWA while remaining committed to AAP. The University of California Press, the MIT Press, the Rockefeller University Press, ITHAKA and Penn State University Press have all done so, and this motivates the SCA to request that AAA follow their initiatives. As the Director of Corporate Affairs for Cambridge University Press stated, ‘We support all sustainable access models that ensure the permanence and integrity of the scholarly record… The Bill as proposed could undermine the underlying freedoms expected by and of scholarly authors.’ (See http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Notes_on_the_Research_Works_Act).
The Executive Board of the SCA shares this view of the proposed legislation, and urges the AAA to formally oppose it.

http://www.aaanet.org/press/FRPAA.htm
http://www.aaanet.org/press/ASSCletter.htm

Some history of this moment is also recoverable from:

Kelty, Christopher M., Michael M. J. Fischer, Alex Golub, Jason Baird Jackson, Kimberly Christen, Michael F. Brown and Tom Boellstorff (2008) Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies. Cultural Anthropology. 23(2):559-588.

(See 586, n. 2) A legal open access version of this article is available via: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3167