Petition Obama for free access to journal articles from taxpayer-funded research

[bananas]

http://bjoern.brembs.net/comment-n852.html

Support the global Access2Research petition now!

There is a petition out in the US asking the Obama administration for an executive order mandating "free, timely access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research". Anyone can sign the petition, not just those based in the US. Here is the text of the petition:

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.

The effort is aimed towards the "We The People" web platform to petition the White House directly. We have 30 days to reach 25,000 signatures, so every day and every signature counts. Given the 11k signatures on the Elsevier boycott and the roughly 30k on the Open Access pledges for support ten years ago, this is a very realistic scenario and if succesfull would require the Obama administration to publicly respond to the petition.

The goal is to reach beyond academia and get as many people as possible to sign the petition to show that Open Access is important for everyone. So what are you waiting for? Go ask you sister, brother, aunt, uncle, mother, father as well as all and any other relatives and friends you have to go and sign this important petition! The official campaign website is at http://access2research.org and there is a Facebook page and a Twitter handle (@access2research) in place. So go and sign the petition, become a fan on Facebook, follow and retweet on Twitter as much as you can for the coming 30 days to get the petition over 25,000 signatures. For today, the Twitter hashtag is #OAMonday.

Posted on Monday 21 May 2012 - 01:13:58

The petition is at http://www.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/require-free-access-over-internet-scientific-journal-articles-arising-taxpayer-funded-research/wDX82FLQ

The official campaign website is at http://access2research.org

The facebook page is http://facebook.com/access2research

The twitter page is https://twitter.com/#!/access2research

The #OAMonday twitter search is http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23OAMonday

[1StrongBlackMan]

1. I'm all for it ...

It would've made my Master's study a little less expensive.

[edcantor]

2. K+R

[StevanHarnad]

3. 24,563 down, 437 signatures to go

24,563 down, 437 signatures to go:

Please be the one to put the Open Access Petition to President Obama over the top: wh.gov/6TH

Any adult worldwide can sign.

Stevan Harnad

[bananas]

4. Welcome to DU, and thanks for the update!

http://www.infotoday.com/it/feb10/Poynder.shtml

Interview With Stevan Harnad
A Prophet Whose Time Has Come
by Richard Poynder

In June 1994, Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist at the University of Southampton in the U.K., posted a message on a mailing list that called on fellow researchers to make their papers freely available on the internet. The message became known as the Subversive Proposal.

“For centuries,” wrote Harnad, “it was only out of reluctant necessity that authors of esoteric publications made the Faustian bargain to allow a price-tag to be erected as a barrier between their work and its (tiny) intended readership because that was the only way to make their work public in the era when paper publication (and its substantial real expenses) were the only way to do so. But today there is another way. …”

In the online age, scientists can make their research freely available to all, he wrote, allowing them to better “build on one another’s work in that collaborative enterprise called learned inquiry.” And the self-archiving movement was born; this later became known as Green Open Access.

<snip>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevan_Harnad

Stevan Harnad (Hernád István Róbert, Hesslein István, born June 2, 1945, Budapest) is a cognitive scientist.

<snip>


Career

Harnad was born in Budapest, Hungary. He did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate work at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. He is currently Canada Research Chair in cognitive science at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and professor of cognitive science at the University of Southampton. He was elected external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2001. His research is on categorization,[1] communication,[2] cognition[3] and consciousness[4] and he has written extensively on categorical perception, symbol grounding, origin of language, lateralization, the Turing test, distributed cognition, scientometrics, and consciousness. Harnad is a former student of Donald O. Hebb[5] and Julian Jaynes.[6]


Activities in academic publishing

In 1978, Harnad was the founder[7] of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, of which he remained editor-in-chief until 2002.[8] In addition, he founded Psycoloquy (an early electronic journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association), CogPrints (an electronic eprint archive in the cognitive sciences hosted by the University of Southampton), and the American Scientist Open Access Forum[9] (since 1998). Harnad is an active promoter of open access (EPrints,[10] EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS),[11] Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS),[12] SPARC Campus Open Access Policies[13]).

<snip>

[Curmudgeoness]

5. 25,544 now----0 needed to

reach goal!

Welcome to DU. It is a pleasure to have you here.