[29] Mike Taylor from the University of Bristol said that the bill's denial of access to scientific research would cause "preventable deaths in developing countries" and "an incalculable loss to science", and said Representatives Issa and Maloney were motivated by multiple donations they had received from the academic publisher Elsevier.

[30] An online petition – The Cost of Knowledge – inspired by British mathematician and Fields medalist Timothy Gowers to raise awareness of the bill, to call for lower prices for journals and to promote increased open access to information, was signed by more than 10,000 scholars.

[31] Signatories vowed to withhold their support from Elsevier journals as editors, reviewers or authors "unless they radically change how they operate".

On February 27, 2012, Elsevier announced its withdrawal of support for the bill, citing concerns from journal authors, editors, and reviewers.

[43] The controversy about Research Works Act finally ended on August 25, 2022, when the US Office of Science and Technology Policy under Biden's administration issued a contractual mandate to make all publications reporting studies funded by the U.S. federal government freely available without delay,[44][45] thus ending over 50 years of the serials crisis, albeit only for U.S. contributions.