Slashdot Mirror
White House Petition For Open Access To Research
dstates writes "You paid for it, you should be able to read the results of publicly funded research. The National Institutes of Health have had a very successful open access mandate requiring that the results of federally funded biomedical research be published in open access journals. Now there is a White House petition to broaden this mandate. This is a jobs issue. Startups and midsize business need access to federally funded technology research. It is a health care issue, patients and community health providers need access, not a few scientists in well funded research institutes, and even wealthy institutions like Harvard are finding the prices of proprietary journals unsustainable."
Now we can have a nice, bullshit, boilerplate response to a legitimate question!
Seriously, is anyone still falling for this obvious scam?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
One of the highest ranked petitions on the site called on the President to advocate for the regulation of Cannabis in a manner similar to alcohol. The administrations response did not mention alcohol once. Further, it was written by the drug czar, who is legally required to oppose any measures that would legalize Cannabis.
Don't think for a moment that anyone is listening to your petition. This is a marketing tool for the president to co-opt your issue. If he can respond to a few unimportant petitions, he gets to claim that he listens to "the people", while ignoring anything that's really important.
For example, after the debacle I described above, someone created a petition for the president to take these petitions seriously. It got the requisite peitions and got a response. They gave some examples of how the petitions influenced policy. Among them were banning puppy mills, digitizing federal records, and a "conversation" on online piracy. Not exactly heavy hitting issues here.
"The People" have absolutely no say on anything that matters in this country. Fuck these petitions, and fuck this president.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I would be in full support of this mandate as long as it includes a provision that all federal research funding must also pay for publishing costs. I am a big fan of open-access journals, but the reality is that many of them are very expensive to publish in. For example, authors are charged almost $3,000 to publish a single article in PLoS Biology. For many researchers who are working off of limited grants, that price makes publishing in those journals impossible. In contrast, many "closed" journals have no costs to the authors because publishing costs are covered by subscription fees. I absolutely do want to see a larger migration to open-access publishing, but I also don't want "open access" mandates to forget about who actually pays for publication.
The scam is you will get some bullshit answer and no matter what you will not change their opinion.
This entire thing is a huge waste of time.