Petition for Public Access to Publicly Funded Research in the United States
I just received this email from my colleague Bethany Nowviskie (the only person I know whose job title actually includes the words “research scientist”):
The ALA, the ACRL, and SPARC, among others, have organized an online petition in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would require that publicly-funded research appear in an open-access repository within six months of its publication in a peer reviewed journal. If passed, this legislation would ease financial pressures on libraries forced to sacrifice humanities collections to expensive scientific serials databases — and would therefore better the situation for university presses, scholars seeking tenure, and everyone on down the food chain.
http://www.publicaccesstoresearch.org/
I’ve signed, and I hope you will, too!
This seems like such a good idea I can’t believe it’s not already the law. I’ve signed, and I hope you will too. I also hope there will be a significant lobbying component to this initiative, since I’m a little skeptical about how much online petitions influence anything (but they certainly don’t hurt, so please do sign). If ALA accomplishes this, I might have to change my mind about them and renew my membership.
Posted: March 14th, 2007 under libraries.
Comments: 2
Comments
Comment from makeup girl
Time: March 14, 2007, 6:39 pm
ALA is riding SPARC’s coattails on this one. All the lobbying (and lobby $$$) that I know about is coming out of SPARC.
Comment from Bethany
Time: March 20, 2007, 8:54 am
Well, “Research Scientist” sounds a bit better than the truth, which would be “Post-Doc Who Never Left!”

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