The New Freedom

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Excellent news, science fans!

A new law, HR2764, has been passed and signed by the Presdient (link to the press release), requiring all research funded by the National Institute of Health to be openly accessible to the public via PubMed within a year. This seems to be largely in part due to a group (which I’d unfortunately never heard about) called the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. This means that more than 65,000 scientific papers will made publicly available every year.

As a university student, I use PubMed all the time for research and for citing my edits on Wikipedia. I find it incredibly frustrating when I want to read an article, but can only read the abstract because I don’t have access to the publishing journal. While this law doesn’t mean that I’ll be able to read all of the journals I want to, it does mean I’ll be able to read a significantly larger portion of them. It makes sense, of course, that we the tax payers funding the research should be able to benefit from it. I’m sure companies like ACS Publications are unhappy about this, but I think that’s great, because those companies are really an affront to science.

We should be thankful to the Alliance for Taxpayer Access for their hard working in campaigning for this law. Their work isn’t finished yet, but this is a massive step in the right direction. Their cause is logical and noble. These are their stated principles:

Statement of Principles:
1. American taxpayers are entitled to open access on the Internet to the peer-reviewed scientific articles on research funded by the U.S. Government.
2. Widespread access to the information contained in these articles is an essential, inseparable component of our nation’s investment in science.
3. This and other scientific information should be shared in cost-effective ways that take advantage of the Internet, stimulate further discovery and innovation, and advance the translation of this knowledge into public benefits.
4. Enhanced access to and expanded sharing of information will lead to usage by millions of scientists, professionals, and individuals, and will deliver an accelerated return on the taxpayers’ investment.

Keep up the good work! Now, I’m off to poke about on PubMed for a few hours.

Rich

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