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"Copyright is a federal law, and generally when state laws conflict with federal laws, federal law wins," Schultz said. "Perhaps more important is there's a First Amendment issue as well. If I take notes in class, and I want to share them, that's speech."

"While existing laws, business models, and outdated educational practices make it difficult for teachers and learners to leverage the full power of the Internet to access high-quality, affordable learning materials, OER can be freely copied and shared (and revised and remixed) without breaking the law."

Scientific information is both a researcher's greatest output and technological innovation's most important resource. Open Access (OA) is the provision of free access to peer-reviewed, scholarly and research information to all. It requires that the rights holder grants worldwide irrevocable right of access to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and make derivative works in any format for any lawful activities with proper attribution to the original author. Open Access uses Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to increase and enhance the dissemination of scholarship. OA is about Freedom, Flexibility and Fairness.

"The open comment period ended last month. Much of the feedback came from two camps: libraries and universities, on the one hand; and scholarly associations and the companies that publish their peer-reviewed journals, on the other. A casual survey of the letters suggests that the feedback largely breaks along familiar lines - librarians arguing for quicker and easier access to research, and publishers offering suggestions for better access while discouraging measures that might threaten their subscription revenues."

During his nearly four years at UC Berkeley, Lucas Zucker has gone to great lengths to find affordable textbooks. He shopped online for the best deals and often waited weeks into the semester for the books to arrive from across the country; he shared books with classmates; he bought older editions with identical content that was rearranged; and one semester he didn't buy some books because they were just too expensive.

The Association of American University Presses does not support the proposed Research Works Act, the group said in a statement released Tuesday. But it also does not support an opposing bill, the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would require public access to the results of federally financed research no later than six months after publication. The other bill would prevent federal agencies from imposing such mandates.

"AN ACT relative to the use of open source software and open data formats by state agencies and relative to the adoption of a statewide information policy regarding open government data standards."

The smart funders will work with the pre-existing prejudice of researchers, probably granting copyright and IP rights to the researchers, but placing tighter constraints on the terms of forward licensing. That funders don't really need the publishers has been made clear by HHMI, Wellcome Trust, and the MPI. Publishing costs are a small proportion of their total expenditure. If necessary they have the resources and will to take that in house. The NIH has taken a similar route though technically implemented in a different way. Other funders will allow these experiments to run, but ultimately they will adopt the approaches that appear to work.