Petition to Require Free Access to Gov't-Funded Research

White House Petition: Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research - RF CafeThe White House website has a Petition area where anyone can start a petition for any cause, and then try to get the 25,000 signatures required for it to be brought to the attention of White House officials... who then subsequently officially ignore it. This particular one showed up on a science website, but I figured I'd link directly to the source website rather than to a story about it. In part the petition reads, "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..." As of this writing the tally is 36,194 - which exceeds the triggering threshold. I'm sure we'll be seeing action on it within days.

Posted  2012