Access2Research is a campaign in the United States for

academic journal publishing reform Academic journal publishing reform is the advocacy for changes in the way academic journals are created and distributed in the age of the Internet and the advent of electronic publishing. Since the rise of the Internet, people have organized campai ...

led by

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

advocates Michael W. Carroll,

Heather Joseph Heather Joseph is a United States-based advocate for open access and particularly academic journal publishing reform. She is the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and a member of the PLOS Boar ...

Mike Rossner Mike Rossner is a United States-based advocate for academic journal publishing reform and open access. He was the director of the Rockefeller University Press from December 2006 to May 2013. Background In 1997, Rossner became editor of the ''Jo ...

, and

John Wilbanks John Wilbanks is the Senior Medical Director at Biogen, and formerly the Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks. Previously he was a Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and at FasterCures. He is known for his work on open sc ...

. On May 20, 2012, it launched a petition to the

White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in 1800. ...

to "require free access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research". The White House has committed to issue an official response to such petitions if they reach 25,000 signatures within 30 days. Access2Research reached this milestone within two weeks. On February 22, 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and announced an executive directive ordering all US Federal Agencies with research & development budgets over $100M to develop public access policies within twelve months. The petition builds on previous campaigns asking scholars, publishers, funders, governments and the general public to remove

paywall A paywall is a method of restricting access to content, with a purchase or a paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their websites as a way to increase revenue after years of ...

s to publicly funded scholarly research. It follows initiatives previously targeted at academics such as

The Cost of Knowledge The Cost of Knowledge is a protest by academics against the business practices of academic journal publisher Elsevier. Among the reasons for the protests were a call for lower prices for journals and to promote increased open access to informat ...

calling for lower prices for scholarly journals and to promote increased access to scientific information. The campaign refers to the

NIH The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

Public Access Policy as an example of a mandate that should be expanded to all federally funded research.

Endorsements

The campaign's outreach was supported on the first day of its launch by

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

, the

Public Library of Science PLOS (for Public Library of Science; PLoS until 2012 ) is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and launc ...

, the

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is an international alliance of academic and research libraries developed by the Association of Research Libraries in 1998 which promotes open access to scholarship. The coalition ...

, RockHealth,

Sage Bionetworks Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit organization in Seattle that promotes open science and patient engagement in the research process. It is led by Lara Mangravite. It was co-founded by Stephen Friend and Eric Schadt. Open science Sage Bionetworks ...

, The Cost of Knowledge, the

Harvard Open Access Project Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher l ...

, the

Open Knowledge Foundation Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. It was founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 in Cambridge, UK. It is incorporated in England an ...

, the Open Science Federation,

PatientsLikeMe PatientsLikeMe is the world’s largest integrated community, health management, and real-world data platform. Through PatientsLikeMe, a growing community of more than 830,000 people with over 2,900 conditions share personal stories and informat ...

and Lybba. It has been publicly endorsed by several other organizations, including the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, the

Association of College and Research Libraries The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association, is a professional association of academic librarians and other interested individuals. It is dedicated to enhancing the ability of academi ...

, the

Association of Research Libraries The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 127 research libraries at comprehensive, research institutions in Canada and the United States. ARL member libraries make up a large portion of the academic and research l ...

, Arizona State University Libraries, BioSharing, The Center for Scholarly Communication and Digital Curation at

Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Charte ...

figshare Figshare is an online open access repository where researchers can preserve and share their research outputs, including figures, datasets, images, and videos. It is free to upload content and free to access, in adherence to the principle of open ...

Genetic Alliance Genetic Alliance is a nonprofit organization, founded in 1986 by Joan O. Weiss, working with Victor A. McKusick, to advocate for health benefits in the accelerating field of genomic research. This organization is a network of over 1,000 disease a ...

, InTechWeb,

Mendeley Mendeley is a reference manager software developed by Elsevier. It is used to manage and share research papers and generate bibliographies for scholarly articles. History The company Mendeley, named after the biologist Gregor Mendel and chemist D ...

and the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best kno ...

Criticism

The petition has been criticized by a spokesperson for the

Association of American Publishers The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is the national trade association of the American book publishing industry. AAP lobbies for book, journal, and education publishers in the United States. AAP members include most of the major commercia ...

who said they "oppose government mandates on research publications", whereas Public Library of Science co-founder

Michael Eisen Michael Bruce Eisen (born April 13, 1967) is an American computational biologist and the editor-in-chief of the journal eLife. He is a professor of genetics, genomics and development at University of California, Berkeley. He is a leading advocate o ...

referred to the petition as a "compromise" that does not go far enough, pointing out that the NIH policy allows for

delayed open access Delayed open-access journals are traditional subscription-based journals that provide free online access upon the expiry of an embargo period following the initial publication date. Details The embargo period before an article is made available ...

References

External links

Etherpad list
of other organizational supporters of the petition * Archived copy of official site: {{Open access navbox Open access projects Academic publishing Petitions 2012 in the United States Articles containing video clips

Endorsements

Criticism

See also

References

External links