25,000 Advocates Urge White House to
Open Taxpayer-Funded Research to Everyone
“We the People Petition” hits 25,000 signatures in just two weeks
Washington,
DC – June 4, 2012 - The movement to make taxpayer-funded research
freely available online hit a new milestone on Sunday when advocates hit
their goal of 25,000 signatures to a
“We the People” petition to the
Obama administration. The
petition, created by Access2Research (a group
of Open Access advocates, including SPARC’s Executive Director, Heather
Joseph), requests that President Obama make taxpayer-funded research
freely available.
According to the petition site’s rules, any petition securing 25,000
signatures within 30 days will be sent to the White House Chief of
Staff, and will receive an official response. The Open Access petition
hit the 25,000 mark in half the allotted time.
“The community is fully engaged in sending a clear message to the
Administration – access to taxpayer-funded information is in the
public’s interest, and they want it now,” said Heather Joseph,
SPARC’s Executive Director.
The petition says: “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.”
The Open Access mandate builds on the National Institutes of Health’s
policy, noting that that agency’s experience “proves that this can be
done without disrupting the research process,” urging the president “to
act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that
fund scientific research.”
John Wilbanks, Senior Fellow in entrepreneurship for the Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation and one of the creators of the petition believes
that the fast uptake by the public signals a new pace in the Open Access
debate. “Opening access to taxpayer-funded research is no longer a
policy discussion happening away from researchers, scientists and
taxpayers. People are now fully part of the conversation, and that
changes everything.”
“The next step is for the White to House to issue an official
response,” said Mike Rossner, Executive Director at The Rockefeller
University Press and an original sponsor of the petition. “Our hope is
that they will act quickly and will require expansion of the successful
NIH policy to all other major U.S. federal funding agencies.”
A number of key organizations outside the academic community endorsed
the petition. The Wikimedia Foundation endorsed the petition and
included a feature article on its Wikipedia’s English Homepage. Patients
advocacy groups from Patients Like Me to the Avon Foundation
promoted the petition to their members, as did a variety of publishers,
university libraries, commercial companies and advocacy organizations.
For further information on the petition, its sponsors and supporting organizations see the SPARC website at
http://www.arl.org/sparc and the Access2Reserach website at
http://access2research.org/.
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SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources
Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international
alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to
create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC’s advocacy,
educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded
dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web at
http://www.arl.org/sparc/.
