[Insight-users] Join the Petition to the White House to Expand Open Access

[Luis Ibanez]

On Monday,
supporters of Open Access launched a campaign <http://wh.gov/6TH>
to petition <http://wh.gov/6TH> the White House for expanding the
Open Access policy to include all federally-funded research.

The petition <http://wh.gov/6TH> entitled:
*"Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles
arising from taxpayer-funded research."* <http://wh.gov/6TH>



States the rationale behind disseminating taxpayer-funded research freely
to the public:

*"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."*


Then refers to the successful Public Access Policy that
NIH<http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm>courageously adopted in
2010.

*"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."*


The petition has already been signed by more than 5,000 people!

In just three days the petition has been signed by more than 13,700 people,

including the endorsement of

the Association of Research and College Librarians:

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/05/legislation/acrl-urges-librarians-to-sign-research-access-petition/


The Public Library of Science

http://www.plos.org/tell-the-white-house-to-expand-open-access-to-federally-funded-research/


and the Open Science Federation

https://plus.google.com/117417705451874519785/posts


but still needs to reach 25,000 signatures in order to be brought to the
President.


Be the next one to sign <http://wh.gov/6TH> and make your voice heard in
support
 of free access to the scientific research that has been paid for
with your taxes.

Small actions matter when you are trying to change the world.
Here is your chance to take a small action that will have a big impact.


A typical journal paper resulting from federally-funded research costs
close to $500,000 to produce. This is the cost of doing the research that
is summarized in the paper, and is what taxpayers have paid for to support
that research. In the absence of Open Access policies, all taxpayers must
go through paywalls of journals in order to get access to the results of
the research that we already paid for. This is despite the fact that the
majority of the labor effort involved in publishing is the result of time
volunteered by researchers when they act as reviewers, associate editors,
and editors of journals.

In the Open Access economic model, publication charges are pre-paid by
federal funding agencies, and amount to 1% of the cost of doing research.
This model results in economic efficiencies, by taking advantage of the
capacity of the Web to disseminate information at very low cost.  That is,
after all, what the Web was created for when Tim Berners Lee invented it at
CERN in1989 <http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/about/web-en.html>.

*"... The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand
for automatic information sharing between scientists
working in different universities and institutes all over the world."*

Ironically, the scientific community is lagging behind everyone else on
adopting the Web and taking advantage of it enormous capacity. Today most
scientific journals still use a paper-based format that originated more
than 300 years ago, and use a publishing business model that used to make
sense in the time when the printing press was the most efficient method of
communication. Even when they use online websites, the underlying structure
of publication is still following a paper format, and a pay
to-access-model, instead of a pay-to-publish model. The Web has made such
old models obsolete:

*"The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the technologies
of personal computers, computer networking and
hypertext into a powerful and easy to use
global information system."*

It is time to realize the full potential of the Web for disseminating
scientific information, by adopting the Open Access policies that will
remove the obstructions that pre-Internet publishing business models are
imposing to the scientific community and to the general public.
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