Will Obama Support Open Access?

This post is part of CDT Fellows Focus, a series that presents the views of notable experts. These posts don't necessarily reflect the views of CDT.

Does the Obama Administration believe in the power of the Internet to maximize the value of public investments in scientific research? We are waiting to find out. Each year, the government spends about $60 billion on basic scientific research. About half of this money goes to the National Institutes of Health, which has an Internet-friendly Public Access Policy that requires all grantees to provide a copy of journal articles and other published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted online within one year after publication. This policy has bipartisan support and has been an unqualified success. So, why not require the other agencies that fund basic research, like the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy, to do the same?

The White House is in the process of deciding how to answer this question. Specifically, the Office of Science and Technology Policy asked for public comment on the issue of open access to science journal articles and scientific research data arising from all federally-funded research - twice. The responses to the White House inquiries show that posting scientific research online benefits multiple audiences: (1) researchers working from home or from a place where they do not have access to institutional subscriptions; (2) entrepreneurs who lack the funds to purchase expensive journal subscriptions; (3) students whose schools cannot afford subscriptions to all the relevant journals; (4) patients and their families who want to read the medical research for themselves; and (5) text mining software that can aid all of the above in interpreting the journal literature to make decisions about new research paths and to make new discoveries about patterns and associations that a human reader alone would never see.

The President has the authority to require that researchers who receive federal grants must agree to provide public access on the Internet to copies of research articles arising from this federal support. Such a policy is fully consistent with copyright law because authors of these articles make a choice to allow their articles to be posted online in exchange for the federal funding that allows them to do the research and write these articles. The Administration has delayed in exercising this authority because a group of journal publishers oppose the principle of taxpayer access to taxpayer-funded research even when the evidence is clear that the NIH policy does not impact their subscription revenues.

Frustrated by this delay, three open access allies, Heather Joseph, John Wilbanks, and Mike Rossner, and I lodged a petition on the White House's "We the People" website. The petition asks the Administration to extend the NIH Public Access Policy to all federal agencies that fund scientific research. If a petition gets 25,000 signatures within 30 days, the Administration says that it will issue an official response. We posted our petition on Sunday, May 20th, and started a website, www.access2research.org, to explain why researchers, students, librarians, innovators, patients' advocacy organizations, and Internet supporters of all kinds have risen up to meet the challenge, and the petition passed the 25,000 mark in just two weeks.

Now that the Administration has to respond at least to the petition, will it side with the public or with the group of publishers who actively resist the idea that publicly funded research should be available on the public Internet?

Michael Carroll is a Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law; Heather Joseph is the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; John Wilbanks is a Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and runs the Consent to Research Project; and Mike Rossner is the Executive Director of the Rockefeller University Press, which publishes three influential journals in the life sciences that make their content freely available online six months after publication.

View the original article here

CDT to ITU: Promote Access and Openness, Don't Stifle It

If members of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)—a UN agency known for its non-transparent, government-centric structure—vote to expand ITU authority to cover Internet policy and technical standards, Internet openness, affordability, and functionality could be at risk.

This shadow of uncertainty has propelled CDT’s recent advocacy ahead of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in December, where governments will update the agency’s treaty and decide whether or not the ITU should expand its authority to areas of Internet governance.

Today, CDT submitted comments to the Public Views and Opinions page of the ITU’s website, in which we state:

revisions to the ITU treaty should to strengthen the current communications environment, the need for the ITU to promote greater access to and the use of communications technologies; our fear that certain proposals might do the opposite. 

Since last spring, CDT has been working to galvanize civil society advocacy around the upcoming WCIT and analyzing leading treaty proposals that we fear could harm Internet openness, increase costs for users, and threaten the exercise of human rights online. We have consistently highlighted our concerns with the WCIT process, which is neither open to full participation by non-state actors, nor transparent to the public. 

In July 2012, the ITU Secretariat built the Public Views and Opinions page in response to calls from digital rights advocates to open the WCIT process to all actors who have a stake in the future of Internet governance. Any individual or group can use this page to submit comments for review by delegates and the public—but the ITU Secretariat has made no promises on how these comments will (or will not) be incorporated into decision-making at the WCIT.

Although the details remain murky, we have the impression that the Secretariat will not include public comments in the official record of the conference unless governments agree that they should do so. Delegations from all countries should vote to include these comments in the official record of the WCIT. 

Whether or not comments make it onto the official record, we also strongly urge both government and civil society members of national delegations to review and incorporate these comments into their own testimony at the WCIT. Civil society groups interested in submitting their own comments for the WCIT should visit CDT’s ITU Resource Center, where we have compiled analyses of treaty proposals, critiques of the WCIT process, and a range of tools for advocates working on this issue.

View the original article here

CDT to ITU: Promote Access and Openness, Don't Stifle It

If members of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)—a UN agency known for its non-transparent, government-centric structure—vote to expand ITU authority to cover Internet policy and technical standards, Internet openness, affordability, and functionality could be at risk.

This shadow of uncertainty has propelled CDT’s recent advocacy ahead of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in December, where governments will update the agency’s treaty and decide whether or not the ITU should expand its authority to areas of Internet governance.

Today, CDT submitted comments to the Public Views and Opinions page of the ITU’s website, in which we state:

revisions to the ITU treaty should to strengthen the current communications environment, the need for the ITU to promote greater access to and the use of communications technologies; our fear that certain proposals might do the opposite. 

Since last spring, CDT has been working to galvanize civil society advocacy around the upcoming WCIT and analyzing leading treaty proposals that we fear could harm Internet openness, increase costs for users, and threaten the exercise of human rights online. We have consistently highlighted our concerns with the WCIT process, which is neither open to full participation by non-state actors, nor transparent to the public. 

In July 2012, the ITU Secretariat built the Public Views and Opinions page in response to calls from digital rights advocates to open the WCIT process to all actors who have a stake in the future of Internet governance. Any individual or group can use this page to submit comments for review by delegates and the public—but the ITU Secretariat has made no promises on how these comments will (or will not) be incorporated into decision-making at the WCIT.

Although the details remain murky, we have the impression that the Secretariat will not include public comments in the official record of the conference unless governments agree that they should do so. Delegations from all countries should vote to include these comments in the official record of the WCIT. 

Whether or not comments make it onto the official record, we also strongly urge both government and civil society members of national delegations to review and incorporate these comments into their own testimony at the WCIT. Civil society groups interested in submitting their own comments for the WCIT should visit CDT’s ITU Resource Center, where we have compiled analyses of treaty proposals, critiques of the WCIT process, and a range of tools for advocates working on this issue.

View the original article here

Will Obama Support Open Access?

This post is part of CDT Fellows Focus, a series that presents the views of notable experts. These posts don't necessarily reflect the views of CDT.

Does the Obama Administration believe in the power of the Internet to maximize the value of public investments in scientific research? We are waiting to find out. Each year, the government spends about $60 billion on basic scientific research. About half of this money goes to the National Institutes of Health, which has an Internet-friendly Public Access Policy that requires all grantees to provide a copy of journal articles and other published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted online within one year after publication. This policy has bipartisan support and has been an unqualified success. So, why not require the other agencies that fund basic research, like the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy, to do the same?

The White House is in the process of deciding how to answer this question. Specifically, the Office of Science and Technology Policy asked for public comment on the issue of open access to science journal articles and scientific research data arising from all federally-funded research - twice. The responses to the White House inquiries show that posting scientific research online benefits multiple audiences: (1) researchers working from home or from a place where they do not have access to institutional subscriptions; (2) entrepreneurs who lack the funds to purchase expensive journal subscriptions; (3) students whose schools cannot afford subscriptions to all the relevant journals; (4) patients and their families who want to read the medical research for themselves; and (5) text mining software that can aid all of the above in interpreting the journal literature to make decisions about new research paths and to make new discoveries about patterns and associations that a human reader alone would never see.

The President has the authority to require that researchers who receive federal grants must agree to provide public access on the Internet to copies of research articles arising from this federal support. Such a policy is fully consistent with copyright law because authors of these articles make a choice to allow their articles to be posted online in exchange for the federal funding that allows them to do the research and write these articles. The Administration has delayed in exercising this authority because a group of journal publishers oppose the principle of taxpayer access to taxpayer-funded research even when the evidence is clear that the NIH policy does not impact their subscription revenues.

Frustrated by this delay, three open access allies, Heather Joseph, John Wilbanks, and Mike Rossner, and I lodged a petition on the White House's "We the People" website. The petition asks the Administration to extend the NIH Public Access Policy to all federal agencies that fund scientific research. If a petition gets 25,000 signatures within 30 days, the Administration says that it will issue an official response. We posted our petition on Sunday, May 20th, and started a website, www.access2research.org, to explain why researchers, students, librarians, innovators, patients' advocacy organizations, and Internet supporters of all kinds have risen up to meet the challenge, and the petition passed the 25,000 mark in just two weeks.

Now that the Administration has to respond at least to the petition, will it side with the public or with the group of publishers who actively resist the idea that publicly funded research should be available on the public Internet?

Michael Carroll is a Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law; Heather Joseph is the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; John Wilbanks is a Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and runs the Consent to Research Project; and Mike Rossner is the Executive Director of the Rockefeller University Press, which publishes three influential journals in the life sciences that make their content freely available online six months after publication.

View the original article here

Will Obama Support Open Access?

This post is part of CDT Fellows Focus, a series that presents the views of notable experts. These posts don't necessarily reflect the views of CDT.

Does the Obama Administration believe in the power of the Internet to maximize the value of public investments in scientific research? We are waiting to find out. Each year, the government spends about $60 billion on basic scientific research. About half of this money goes to the National Institutes of Health, which has an Internet-friendly Public Access Policy that requires all grantees to provide a copy of journal articles and other published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted online within one year after publication. This policy has bipartisan support and has been an unqualified success. So, why not require the other agencies that fund basic research, like the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy, to do the same?

The White House is in the process of deciding how to answer this question. Specifically, the Office of Science and Technology Policy asked for public comment on the issue of open access to science journal articles and scientific research data arising from all federally-funded research - twice. The responses to the White House inquiries show that posting scientific research online benefits multiple audiences: (1) researchers working from home or from a place where they do not have access to institutional subscriptions; (2) entrepreneurs who lack the funds to purchase expensive journal subscriptions; (3) students whose schools cannot afford subscriptions to all the relevant journals; (4) patients and their families who want to read the medical research for themselves; and (5) text mining software that can aid all of the above in interpreting the journal literature to make decisions about new research paths and to make new discoveries about patterns and associations that a human reader alone would never see.

The President has the authority to require that researchers who receive federal grants must agree to provide public access on the Internet to copies of research articles arising from this federal support. Such a policy is fully consistent with copyright law because authors of these articles make a choice to allow their articles to be posted online in exchange for the federal funding that allows them to do the research and write these articles. The Administration has delayed in exercising this authority because a group of journal publishers oppose the principle of taxpayer access to taxpayer-funded research even when the evidence is clear that the NIH policy does not impact their subscription revenues.

Frustrated by this delay, three open access allies, Heather Joseph, John Wilbanks, and Mike Rossner, and I lodged a petition on the White House's "We the People" website. The petition asks the Administration to extend the NIH Public Access Policy to all federal agencies that fund scientific research. If a petition gets 25,000 signatures within 30 days, the Administration says that it will issue an official response. We posted our petition on Sunday, May 20th, and started a website, www.access2research.org, to explain why researchers, students, librarians, innovators, patients' advocacy organizations, and Internet supporters of all kinds have risen up to meet the challenge, and the petition passed the 25,000 mark in just two weeks.

Now that the Administration has to respond at least to the petition, will it side with the public or with the group of publishers who actively resist the idea that publicly funded research should be available on the public Internet?

Michael Carroll is a Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law; Heather Joseph is the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; John Wilbanks is a Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and runs the Consent to Research Project; and Mike Rossner is the Executive Director of the Rockefeller University Press, which publishes three influential journals in the life sciences that make their content freely available online six months after publication.

View the original article here