A Step Forward for Open Access

The U.S. Congress has approved legislation that would provide free public access to all published research funded by the National Institutes of Health, despite a lobbying campaign by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which includes leading scientific publishers like Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society. Earlier this year, AAP hired the PR firm of Dezenhall Resources to campaign against open access. In August, it launched Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM), to promote its claim that open access would undermine peer review.