Sign up and declare your support for free open access to research.
We encourage you to add your name or that of your department in support of the following statements:
- Publicly funded research needs to be available to the public.
- Open access is “the free, immediate and online availability of research articles and their supporting data, coupled with the rights to use this information fully in the digital environment”.
- Open access to knowledge allows all researchers and citizens around the world to participate in the consumption and production of further knowledge in accordance with Merton’s laws of:
- Universalism (all scientists can contribute to science regardless of race, nationality, culture, or gender) and
- Communalism (the idea that scientific results are the common property of the entire scientific community).*
- The considerable challenges facing humanity such as food security, pollution, climate change, energy production, water management and others are only resolvable if all the world’s researchers are able to share their findings with one another.
*From Robert Merton’s 1942 work “The Normative Structure of Science” Available as a chapter in: Merton, Robert K. (1973) “The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations” University of Chicago Press
