White House Open Science Petition

If you watched Lessig's talk that I wrote about in April, you learned that closed access journals are hampering scientific innovation by making it difficult for citizens and even scientists at institutions with limited funds to access papers that by all rights everyone should have access to.

The vast majority of scientific research at academic institutions and elsewhere is in some sense taxpayer-funded, whether directly through grants, through access to state-subsidized labs, or even as part of the curriculum of students who are using federally-subsidized student loans.  Shouldn't the taxpayer have access to what they paid for?  The publishing industry thinks not, and recently lobbied for the Research Works Act which would have prohibited the NIH among other agencies from mandating that the work they fund be open-access.

Until June 19, there is an open petition at whitehouse.gov that you may digitally sign to ask the Obama administration to ensure that, to the contrary, all taxpayer-funded work be free for everyone to access on the internet.  At the time of writing, the petition already has over 10,000 signatures.  Signing it is a small thing that you can do to promote open science.