A start anyway, I could be really annoying if I have access to full articles. I'd become even more arrogant.
Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research
By
Dr. John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology
and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Thank you for your participation
in the We the People platform. The Obama Administration agrees that
citizens deserve easy access to the results of research their tax
dollars have paid for. As you may know, the Office of Science and
Technology Policy has been looking into this issue for some time and has
reached out to the public on two occasions for input on the question of
how best to achieve this goal of democratizing the results of
federally-funded research. Your petition has been important to our
discussions of this issue.
The logic behind enhanced public
access is plain. We know that scientific research supported by the
Federal Government spurs scientific breakthroughs and economic advances
when research results are made available to innovators. Policies that
mobilize these intellectual assets for re-use through broader access can
accelerate scientific breakthroughs, increase innovation, and promote
economic growth. That’s why the Obama Administration is committed to
ensuring that the results of federally-funded scientific research are
made available to and useful for the public, industry, and the
scientific community.
Moreover, this research was
funded by taxpayer dollars. Americans should have easy access to the
results of research they help support.
To that end, I have issued a memorandum today (.pdf)
to Federal agencies that directs those with more than $100 million in
research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the
results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge
within 12 months after original publication. As you pointed out, the
public access policy adopted by the National Institutes of Health has
been a great success. And while this new policy call does not insist
that every agency copy the NIH approach exactly, it does ensure that
similar policies will appear across government.
As I mentioned, these policies were developed carefully through
extensive public consultation. We wanted to strike the balance between
the extraordinary public benefit of increasing public access to the
results of federally-funded scientific research and the need to ensure
that the valuable contributions that the scientific publishing industry
provides are not lost. This policy reflects that balance, and it also
provides the flexibility to make changes in the future based on
experience and evidence. For example, agencies have been asked to use a
12-month embargo period as a guide for developing their policies, but
also to provide a mechanism for stakeholders to petition the agency to
change that period. As agencies move forward with developing and
implementing these polices, there will be ample opportunity for further
public input to ensure they are doing the best possible job of
reconciling all of the relevant interests.
In addition to addressing the
issue of public access to scientific publications, the memorandum
requires that agencies start to address the need to improve upon the
management and sharing of scientific data produced with Federal funding.
Strengthening these policies will promote entrepreneurship and jobs
growth in addition to driving scientific progress. Access to
pre-existing data sets can accelerate growth by allowing companies to
focus resources and efforts on understanding and fully exploiting
discoveries instead of repeating basic, pre-competitive work already
documented elsewhere. For example, open weather data underpins the
forecasting industry and provides great public benefits, and making
human genome sequences publically available has spawned many biomedical
innovations—not to mention many companies generating billions of dollars
in revenues and the jobs that go with them. Going forward, wider
availability of scientific data will create innovative economic markets
for services related to data curation, preservation, analysis, and
visualization, among others.
So thank you again for your
petition. I hope you will agree that the Administration has done its
homework and responded substantively to your request.
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