(There is a short
Q&A with OA advocate John Wilbanks below. Scroll down if you wish to skip this
introduction)
**This petition reached the threshold 25,000 signatures on 3rd June 2012**
**This petition reached the threshold 25,000 signatures on 3rd June 2012**
Earlier
this month a group of Open Access (OA) advocates flew to Washington to attend a meeting with the US Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP). Their objective was to convince OSTP that it is
vital the US government ensures that all publicly-funded research is made freely
available on the Internet.
The
omens seemed good: at the end of last year the OSTP had issued an RFI on Public
Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting from Federally Funded
Research,
and the Obama Administration has been making positive noises about OA for a
while now (although without introducing any new policies as yet).
Moreover,
in February the OA movement had defeated a piece of
publisher-backed legislation called the Research Works Act (RWA) that, if it had
passed, would have slain the poster child of the OA movement — the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy. This policy requires
that all NIH-funded papers are made freely available on the Web within 12
months of publication.
The same month a piece of bipartisan legislation — the Federal Research Public
Access Act (FRPAA)
— had been introduced in both US houses that would have the reverse effect of
the RWA. If passed, it would propagate the NIH policy to a dozen or so other US federal
agencies, and reduce the current NIH embargo from 12 months to six.
Nagging feeling
Flying home to the West Coast on a redeye, however, Wilbanks
began to experience a nagging feeling that their job was not complete. After
all, he thought, the OSTP had made no promises; and it would inevitably be
talking to publishers as well. And publishers tell a very different story about OA.
“And
it hit me — us, because I was with Mike Carroll, Mike
Rossner, and Heather
Joseph — that the redeyes and the meetings and the arguing were not
carrying the day,” Wilbanks explained on this blog.
“We needed to do something else.”
That
something else became an initiative called Access2Research. The objective was to engage
the public in the discussions about OA. As Wilbanks wrote on his blog,
“The only thing missing from the open access debate is the public.”
The
best way of engaging the people, it was decided, was to launch a petition on the “We the People” site — which
was introduced on whitehouse.gov by the US
government last September — and invite the public to sign it.
The
petition — which went live on the night of 20th May — reads: “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.”
It ends by urging President Obama “to act now to implement open access
policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.”
In
order to receive a response from the US government the petition must attract 25,000
signatures within 30 days (i.e. 19th June). But here too the omens
are good: within the first two and a half days the petition had attracted half the number
of signatures necessary, with roughly 200 being added every hour.
At
the time of writing the number stands at 16,443,
two thirds of the way there, yet with 24 days still to run.
