Nature boosts the campaign of an adamant UK open-access advocate
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0174
Michael P. Taylor , a computer programmer and research associate in Earth sciences at the University of Bristol, UK, says that he finds himself “burning tens of hours every month on open-access campaigning.” His adamancy shows in the headline on his January Guardian commentary “Academic publishers have become the enemies of science ” (discussed in a report in this venue).
Now the 31 May Nature is publicizing the open-access initiative that Taylor promoted last week in a Guardian blog posting under the headline “US petition could tip the scales in favour of open access publishing .” The subheadline said, “A petition urges President Obama to implement open access for all federally funded research. This is our chance to demonstrate public support and goad the White House into action.”
In a substantive subsequent discussion, the Guardian accepted 30 online comments, including eight from Taylor, who emphasized that early this month David Willetts, the UK’s universities and science minister, announced an intention to make taxpayer-funded academic articles freely available. In neither text nor comments, however, did Taylor mention Willetts’s emphasis on preserving “the value added by academic publishers.” (Taylor tends to conflate not-for-profit scientific publishers with the commercial ones, and tends also to scant the fact that some journal articles are processed not by volunteers but by PhD scientists paid to work as professional editors.)
The 13 May online petition appears on the White House website and petitions the administration to “require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.” Here’s the full text:
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. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.
The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.
It’s unclear who originated the petition. Nature publicized it in the Seven Days section, reporting in the headline that it “urges for open access to research"—phrasing that misleadingly conflates research results with the finished products of scientific publishing. The blurb itself, however, clears that up and adds a bit more information. It begins, “An online petition urging journal articles from US taxpayer-funded research to be made freely available had gained around 19,000 signatures by 28 May. The White House will have to officially respond if the petition gains 25,000 signatures.”
As of midmorning on 31 May, the petition had nearly 22,000 signatures.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.