"For whatever reason, the White House has not yet responded to a petition demanding "free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research"—even though the petition is 10 months old and has more than 56,000 signatures."
-From Ars Technica
The White House has increased its petition threshold for a response from 25,000 signatures to 100,000. This has the effect of decreasing the number of petitions the administration would need to respond to, including that of the petition to construct a Death Star or the several petitions for southern states to secede from the union. One petition that caught my eye in this blurb though, is a petition that is discussed above.
The full text of the original petition, found at whitehouse.gov, states
"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."
The abstract to the public policy webpage outlines the law:
"The NIH Public Access Policy implements Division G, Title
II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008).
The law states:
The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law."
The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law."
Though this law would ideally foster greater collaboration and public access to cutting edge research, problems of safety risks and copyright infringement must surely be weighed. I'm no copyright lawyer, and so generation of a dialogue between publishers, the public, and law makers needs to open up.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-free-access-over-internet-scientific-journal-articles-arising-taxpayer-funded-research/wDX82FLQ
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/100k-signatures-now-needed-before-white-house-comments-on-death-star-plans/
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