A petition at whitehouse.gov went live this morning, asking that the fruits of taxpayer-funded research be made publicly accessible — in effect broadening the existing NIH policy.
Go to access2research.org for more information about this campaign, and a link to the petition page. The organizers are hoping to get 25,000 signatures, and to get to that level relatively quickly. Anyone over age 13 can sign. Please consider signing. I signed. #openaccess.
Here is the text of the petition. It’s short, because of the limits imposed by the White House online petition process:
WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:
Require free, timely access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.
We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.
The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.