Access2Research on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
Access2Research is a campaign in the United States for
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
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 o ...
advocates Michael W. Carroll
Michael W. Carroll is a Professor of Law and Director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University's Washington College of Law. Carroll is one of the founding Board Members of Creative Commons, a not-fo ...
, Heather Joseph, Mike Rossner, and John Wilbanks.
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 Northwest, Washington, D.C., NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. preside ...
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 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 1 ...
Public Access Policy as an example of a mandate
Mandate most often refers to:
* League of Nations mandates, quasi-colonial territories established under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, 28 June 1919
* Mandate (politics), the power granted by an electorate
Mandate may also r ...
that should be expanded to all federally funded research.
Endorsements
The campaign's outreach was supported on the first day of its launch byCreative 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 releas ...
, 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 c ...
, RockHealth, Sage Bionetworks, The Cost of Knowledge, the Harvard Open Access Project, 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 a ...
, the Open Science Federation
Open or OPEN may refer to:
Music
* Open (band), Australian pop/rock band
* The Open (band), English indie rock band
* ''Open'' (Blues Image album), 1969
* ''Open'' (Gotthard album), 1999
* ''Open'' (Cowboy Junkies album), 2001
* ''Open'' (YF ...
, 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 ...
, 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.
Chart ...
, 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 d ...
, Genetic Alliance, 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 theAssociation 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 ...
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 ...
.
See also
*Access to knowledge movement
The Access to Knowledge (A2K) movement is a loose collection of civil society groups, governments, and individuals converging on the idea that access to knowledge should be linked to fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic develop ...
* Fair Copyright in Research Works Act
* Federal Research Public Access Act The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) is a proposal to require open public access to research funded by eleven U.S. federal government agencies. It was originally proposed by Senators John Cornyn and Joe Lieberman in 2006 and then again i ...
* Research Works Act
* Academic Spring
The Academic Spring was the designation, inspired by the Arab Spring, used for a short time in 2012 to indicate movements by academics, researchers, and scholars opposing the restrictive copyright and circulation of traditional academic journals ...
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