Open Access Petition

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Janet Clarke

The Obama administration is currently considering which policy priorities they will act on before the 2012 election season swings into high gear. There is a brief, critical window of opportunity to ensure that public access to the results of federally funded research is one of those priorities. On May 21, a petition calling for Public Access to Federally Funded Research Results was posted on the White House’s “We the People” website. If the petition garners 25,000 signatures within 30 days, it will be reviewed by White House staff and considered for action.

Please show your support for this policy and sign the petition.

Why Open Access?
Funders invest in research in order to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, encourage innovation, enrich education, and stimulate the economy – to improve the public good. They recognize that broad access to the results of research is an essential component of the research process itself. Research advances only through sharing of results, and the value of an investment in research is only maximized through wide use of its results.
Yet, too often, research results are not available to the broadest community of potential users. The Internet provides a new opportunity to bring information to a wider audience at virtually no marginal cost, and allow them to use it in new, innovative ways. This has resulted in a call for new framework to allow research results to be more easily accessed and used—a call for Open Access. You can also watch a brief video (see below) put together by the Association of Research Libraries (of which Stony Brook is a member) that explains the current cost and access barriers to published scientific research.

What is Open Access?
Open Access means the free, immediate, availability on the public Internet of those works which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment – permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose.