Nine months ago open access advocates took to the
White House’s “We the People” petition site to ask the government
to make
taxpayer-funded academic research freely available to the
public. They reached threshold for a response (25,000 signatures at
the time) in June, but there had been no response, until now.
Now, a little over a month after
Aaron Swartz committed suicide rather than face federal
imprisonment over charges related to his efforts to download and
make accessible academic research at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, the White House has
responded affirmatively. John Holdren, President Barack Obama’s
assistant to the president for science and technology and director
of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (imagine
what his business card must look like) posted the administraton’s
position:
The Obama Administration agrees that citizens deserve easy
access to the results of research their tax dollars have paid for.
As you may know, the Office of Science and Technology Policy has
been looking into this issue for some time and has reached out to
the public on two occasions for input on the question of how best
to achieve this goal of democratizing the results of
federally-funded research. Your petition has been important to our
discussions of this issue.
The logic behind enhanced public access is plain. We know that
scientific research supported by the Federal Government spurs
scientific breakthroughs and economic advances when research
results are made available to innovators. Policies that mobilize
these intellectual assets for re-use through broader access can
accelerate scientific breakthroughs, increase innovation, and
promote economic growth. That’s why the Obama Administration is
committed to ensuring that the results of federally-funded
scientific research are made available to and useful for the
public, industry, and the scientific community.
Moreover, this research was funded by taxpayer dollars.
Americans should have easy access to the results of research they
help support.
We can argue about whether we actually need the federal
government to subsidize the research (particularly given how much
the federal government already heavily subsidizes the salaries of
college faculties via student financial aid), but that’s another
issue.
Holdren is going to attempt to implement a policy similar to the
approach by the National Institute of Health (NIH). The NIH
requires research that they’ve funded to become publicly accessible
for free online after a year of publication. The delay allows the
publishing companies time to sell access and recoup the costs they
bear in organizing peer review and earn a profit. Holdren’s plan is
to extend this model to any federal agency that spends more than
$100 million a year in research and development.
At the same time as the White House is responding, Congress is
considering legislation as well. As Richard Van Noorden noted over
at
Nature’s blog, a bipartisan group of senators and
representatives introduced legislation earlier this month to open
up access to taxpayer-funded research papers six months after
publication. This will be the fourth attempt by Congress members to
pass legislation to open access to research. ;
I wrote about efforts to open access to academic research last
June. Read about it
here. … Read More
