A Petition for Free Online Access of Taxpayer-funded Research

Science is cumulative. But to be truly cumulative, we need to be able to read and understand what has come before us. And this comes down to an issue of access.

Many scientific papers are locked away behind paywalls. But the federal government pays for nearly all of this research! So not only should we have access to it in order to allow science to build upon itself, but as a citizenry we have paid for this research and should be able to access it.

Access2Research is a movement to "Require free access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research." And it has recently begun a petition over at Whitehouse.gov for the following:

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.

Go sign it.

*Top image: *F. D. Richards/Flickr/CC-licensed