Require free access to scientific articles based on taxpayer-funded research.

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/require-free-access-over-internet-scientific-journal-articles-arising-taxpayer-funded-research/wDX82FLQ

by tylerneylon • 14 years ago

155 22 14 years ago

wwws.whitehouse.gov

asdf333• 14 years ago

This was on here before, but when I signed it, it had just barely broken 4k. Great to see it already up to 15k!

I am loathe to sign political petitions b/c oftentimes its not very clear to me whether the proposed change does not have any unforeseen negative repercussions.

I can't see how this could be a bad thing. As taxpayers we are already paying for the research. Why should we have to pay a private corporation yet again (or fund the costs for our public universities to pay for them)?

rflrob• 14 years ago

It's also worth noting that the NIH has had such a policy in effect since around 2008. It's conceivable that making it universal for federally funded research would so disrupt the business model of journals that they'd collapse, but they're run by smart (if stodgy) people, and I'm sure during the phase-in they'd figure out a new business model that would work.

tylerneylon• 14 years ago

To be clear, the 'require' part of this petition is not targeted at researchers, but at publishers.

Publishers want to own their papers' copyrights, and have exclusive publishing rights. The fairness of this is questionable when they aren't paying for the core work done to produce the papers. They apply a lot of pressure to keep research behind paywalls, often against the will of the funders and the researchers. The idea of this petition is to give researchers and government funding agencies some legal strength if they want their work to be freely available.

Canuteson• 14 years ago

Add to that a licensing fee payable to the treasury for commercial use of tax payer funded research, e.g., prescription drug patents.

law2• 14 years ago

I don't sign petitions, because that type of feel-good inaction is one of the major problems in America today. Instead, I support the efforts of Carl Malamud at public.resource.org and am trying to figure out a way to crowdsource PACER. Admittedly, these efforts differ substantively from the petition's goal of 'liberating' publicly-funded research from the shackles of for-profit corporations, but many of the issues are analogous.

The most serious problem with PACER (which is the online docket system for federal courts) is that each 'page' costs the user $0.10, which precludes any meaningful search or analysis of data. I fear that if the government were to provide access to research articles and the like, they may institute similar measures to profit from the availability of this information. I realize that this is an unsubstantiated fear, but it's extremely important to consider how to implement such policies.

Remember, these publishers' very existence depends on profiting from access to journal articles. As such, they will literally fight to the death over this issue.

eupharis• 14 years ago

I agree that your work crowdsourcing PACER will have a far greater positive impact on American democracy than my signing this petition.

But it's not like I or anyone else who signs this petition is going to dust off our hands afterwards and say, "Ok done with politics."

The difference between this and other online petitions is that the White House will respond to it if it reaches 25,000 signers. Which should be in about 6.68 days, give or take.[1]

In the past these responses have oft been positive. At minimum they have been thoughtful.

Remember a political outcry, in part expressed through petitions, has worked in the recent past: it derailed SOPA.

None of the smaller political acts (petitions, letters to congressmen, debates with friends) are sufficient. But they are necessary.

[1](25,000 - current signatures) / (current signatures / days since creation)

RichardPrice• 14 years ago

From talking to the White House, I know that they are taking a great interest in this particular petition. They are looking to see how much public support there is for free public access to taxpayer-funded research. It is only with a public mandate that they will be able to push through open access legislation against the objections of the journal industry.

There is a very direct relationship between how much support this petition gets, and how willing the White House, and members of Congress, will be, in the short term, to push through open access legislation.

a3d6g2f7• 14 years ago

I'm genuinely curious, what would you do with the data?

Please do not read this the wrong way. I am not questioning what you're doing as improper. I am just curious.

Isn't most of the data in PACER just procedural (cf. substantive)? If yes, wouldn't it have only limited value in illuminating to the public "what the law is"? Would it have some other value? Maybe it might allow generation of some interesting statistics on outcomes, etc.? Maybe you are planning to "disrupt" the jury research industry?

Pardon my ignorance.

(Personally, I think you should also support freeing up access to academic research. Public access to research publications is equally as important as access to the total corpus of US Court dockets. I'm not sure anyone could learn that much just by reading court dockets. But I can assure you that by reading the scientific literature in a given field of science, one can learn a great deal.)

law2• 14 years ago

What I want to do with the data is largely irrelevant; I care more about being free to analyze this data--data that belongs to the public.

But to answer your question more precisely, I'm interested in identifying trends in the courts with respect to litigated issues. It'd be interesting to determine whether certain pre-trial motions have a higher propensity to be granted/denied in a particular court, before a particular judge, etc. Additionally, I'm interested in tracking cases on which attorneys and law firms typically rely when writing their briefs or other documents submitted to the court.

merraksh• 14 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4002152

pithon2• 14 years ago

Who pays the hosting fees?

a_bonobo• 14 years ago

Hosting fees by who?

Open Access journals like PLoS are usually paid by the institute who wants to publish, it costs around $2000-$3000 per paper. In a lot of cases, this cost is carried by a OA-policy or a university's grant for OA-related costs.

If this policy is successful, I guess the tax-payer will carry these costs.

ryguytilidie• 14 years ago

This is seriously the worry people have? Scribd hosts documents for free. Academia.edu hosts documents for free and in fact ENCOURAGES academics to post papers there. If a website is willing to host the papers for free versus having a system where we spend millions on research so that journals can put it behind their paywall I feel like the future has written itself already.

pithon2• 14 years ago

From the petition:

"Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet"

I'm just pointing out that requiring it to be posted on the internet requires someone to host it.

femto• 14 years ago

The public? The public has just stumped up the cash for the research, so adding the cost of hosting the resulting papers for perpetuity would be a negligible addition to the original grant.

warmfuzzykitten2• 14 years ago

I've signed in about 10 times but every time I go back to the petition page it requires me to sign in again. :(

cpeterso• 14 years ago

I misread your comment as "I've signed it about 10 times". :)

jnbiche• 14 years ago

I had this same problem. Really makes me wonder about the White House web development office, as they are clearly either nefarious or incompetent.

warmfuzzykitten2• 14 years ago

"Never attribute to X what can be explained by simple incompetence." :)

Alex3917• 14 years ago

Even though not a single petition has been taken seriously so far, I think this one actually has a decent shot. If Obama acts were to actually act on one of them before the next election then this one probably has the best chance because it's a relatively small change, and it probably wouldn't be excessively controversial.

crumblan• 14 years ago

Let's take it one step further: all products of any taxpayer-funded research are public domain. This includes patents, articles, and datasets.

Require free access to scientific articles based on taxpayer-funded research.

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