[BlueObelisk-discuss] Fwd: [open-science] access2research - just over 5000 signatures to go

[Egon Willighagen]

Hi all,

I have not seen this pass the Blue Obelisk mailing list yet... I'm
sure you have seen it already, but if you haven't, you may want to
have a look at it... Interestingly, non-USA people are explicitly
invited to sign the petition too...

They are a mere 500 signatures away from the 25k limit which is a
critical limit for being taken seriously... importantly, it needs more
sharing, to get non-scientists (that agree with the petition, of
course) signing it too... to me, it's makes perfect sense: I pay tax,
but get something in return. Seems logical to me.

The old system is just old. Publishing in the world worked, and was
important. Books were expensive to print, and journals were expensive
to distribution; the code of these things scaled with the use. These
costs, however, have been reduced enormously (not removed) with the
rise of the internet and computer technology in general. Some things
are still expensive, like copy/editing, doing the layout, helping
authors make fancy graphics. But these things scale with the writing,
not with distribution.

Therefore, an Open Access model where you pay a fee for the getting it
look pretty makes sense to me.

And that I pay taxes for new "railway lines" makes sense to me too, so
I signed this petition, hoping that all that publicly funded research
will create a "railway system" on which academics can find more
answers to societal problems, and companies convert that into actual
solutions.

Makes sense, not?

If you agree, please spread the word among all your non-scientist
friends/family, make them aware of the issues, and point them to the
petition. It's a free world: I am not suggesting you or others should
sign; instead, I explained why I did, and hope to have made you think
about the situation too.

Greetings,

Egon


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jenny Molloy <***@okfn.org>
Date: Tue, May 29, 2012 at 11:03 PM
Subject: [open-science] access2research - just over 5000 signatures to go
To: open-***@lists.okfn.org, open-***@lists.okfn.org, Open
Knowledge Foundation discussion list <okfn-***@lists.okfn.org>


Dear All

Many of you will have already heard of the http://access2research.org
petition to encourage the White House to consider further opening up
of access to scientific publications.

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/require-free-access-over-internet-scientific-journal-articles-arising-taxpayer-funded-research/wDX82FLQ

This is endorsed by the OKFN
http://blog.okfn.org/2012/05/21/petition-the-white-house-to-open-up-publicly-funded-research/
and it would be fantastic to see as many of our supporters as possible
signing and encouraging others to do the same - they are edging
towards the 20,000 mark and require just over 5,000 more signatures by
June 19 to guarantee a response from the administration.

You do not need to be American, just over the age of 13 with an easily
created whitehouse.gov account.

Many more details below for those willing to spread the word around
their social networks and thanks very much to those who already have!

Jenny

--------------------------------------------------------------

On *Monday, May 21*, we lodge a petition on the White House’s “We the
People” page asking the Obama administration to require that all
federally funded research be posted on the Web – extending the
principle of the NIH policy to all federal agencies.

1. What We’re Asking

· Publicity/ Call for Participation.  Please help line up publicity
for the petition before Monday.  Specifically, can you help get it on
the front pages of Reddit, Tumblr, Wikipedia, Boing Boing, and send
out an all-hands-on-deck request through your own blogs/twitter feeds,
etc?

· 25,000 signatures in 30 days gets an official Administration
response.  We want to hit that number fast to escalate this issue
inside the White House.  We believe the policy has support but is
stuck.  This could well be the event that gets it through.

· Please sign the petition on Monday.

2. Social Media links/handles

The official campaign website is at http://access2research.org and
there are already Facebook pages (http://facebook.com/access2research)
and Twitter handles (@access2research) in place.

3. Petition Text (800 character limit)

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO: [This doesn't count toward
the character count]

Require free access over the Internet to journal articles arising from
taxpayer-funded research.

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 would give
access to entrepreneurs, researchers, patients, caregivers, and
students, who currently are blocked by high costs. We know this works
without disturbing the process of scientific publishing because the
National Institutes of Health is already doing it through its highly
successful Public Access Policy. All other federal agencies that fund
research should have similar policies.

President Obama, please act now to make federally-funded research
freely available to taxpayers on the Internet.

4. The Ask to Others

To sign the petition:

-   Have to be 13 years or older
-   Have to create an account on whitehouse.gov, which requires giving
a name and an email address and then clicking the validation link sent
to that address
-   Click to sign

5. Further Context

After years of work on promoting policy change to make
federally-funded research available on the Internet, and after winning
the battle to implement a public access policy at NIH, it has become
clear that being on the right side of the issue is necessary but not
sufficient. We've had the meetings, done the hearings, replied to the
requests for information.

But we're opposed in our work by a small set of publishers who profit
enormously from the existing system, even though there is no evidence
that the NIH policy has had any measurable impact on their business
models. They can - and do - outspend those of us who have chosen to
make a huge part of our daily work the expansion of access to
knowledge. This puts the idea of access at a disadvantage. We know
there is a serious debate about the extension of public access to
taxpayer funded research going on right now in the White House, but we
also know that we need more than our current  approaches to get that
extension made into federal policy.

The best approach that we have yet to try is to make a broad public
appeal for support, straight to the people. The Obama Administration
has created a web platform to petition the White House directly called
We The People. Any petition receiving more than 25,000 digital
signatures is placed on the desk of the President's Chief of Staff and
must be integrated into policy and political discussions. But there's
a catch - a petition only has 30 days to gather the required number of
signatures to qualify.

We can get 25,000 signatures. And if we not only get 25,000, but an
order of magnitude more, we can change the debate happening right now.

Next week we will publish our petition and the 30 day cycle begins.
What we're asking you to do is to leverage your personal and
professional networks to get the word out.

You can do this in any way that makes you feel comfortable. A blog
post, an email to constituencies, a tweet, a facebook share, you name
it - something that tells thousands of people "I support this
petition, I'm signing this petition, and I thought you should know
about it too." Because this isn't just slacktivism with a "like" or a
retweet - people need to go to the White House website, enter their
name and email address, and hit the button.

Qualified signers must be 13 years old or more, and have a valid email
address. That's all.

The goal is not just to get 25,000, but to get far more to show the
White House that this issue matters to people, not just a few
publishers.

We are launching the campaign on Monday May 21. The petition will go
live late Sunday night May 20, so that the waves can start in the EU
and sweep west with the sunrise. We're asking you to turn on your
networks on Monday morning.

Thanks for considering this. If we can all come together to get the
word out at once, and stay behind it for 30 days, we have a real
chance to get access to taxpayer funded research across the entire
government, and send a signal that the people have a voice in this
debate, not just publishers and activists.



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[Peter Murray-Rust]

Post by Egon Willighagen
Hi all,
I have not seen this pass the Blue Obelisk mailing list yet... I'm
sure you have seen it already, but if you haven't, you may want to
have a look at it... Interestingly, non-USA people are explicitly
invited to sign the petition too...

Thanks Egon,
The Blue Obelisk Mantra is:
Open Data
Open Standards
Open Source

Note that we deliberately did not require Open Access in the Blue Obelisk.

We have done very very well on Open Source and pretty well on Open
Standards (it works even though we don't and possibly won't have crystal
clear definitions)

But we are stalled on Open Data (which means CC0 or equivalent). There's
probably 0.1% of chemical data which is Open (mainly crystallography and
resources from bioscience). There are virtually no open spectra (I guess 10
million are "published" each year and ten times more that aren't, the same
for chemical reactions, and the same for computational chemistry. None of
the major chemical publishers allows content-mining by default - you have
to ask each time and no-one has given me CC-BY permission for the result.
As a result the culture of chemistry actively militates against data
publication.

This petition will be a stepping stone towards making the scientific
literature available for automatic re-use, from which we can then
automatically extract data. I and a virtual community are now working
actively on this technology - it covers all the instances above. I can, for
example extract spectra,

But at present I am not allowed to republish the results as CC0, even if
they are factual data. As a result I cannot continue my research in
chemistry and so I have branched out into phylogenetics where I *am*
allowed to mine part of the literature as it is published in part in BMC
and PLoS where permission (CC-BY) is zero effort

The publishing restrictions are strangling innovation in open chemical
informatics. Please vote to remove them.