President Obama: Make Publicly Funded Research Freely Available!

To sign the petition directly, visit http://wh.gov/6TH

More information at http://www.access2research.org

Animation by Mike McCarthy of http://www.drawnalong.com

This video was produced by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition): http://www.arl.org/sparc

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  Nonprofits & Activism

[sofias. orange]

"creating jobs" did yuo really have to go for _this_ crap.

[Debbie Brendan]

The peer review process is free. Experts are not typically paid to be editors and associate editors at scientific journals.

Reviewers are not paid to review papers. It is considered a professional obligation and service.

Publishers benefit immensely from free work.

If I am wrong, please post how much a reviewer gets paid to review a paper and let me know what journals are paying, because I've been getting ripped off (along with my colleagues).

[Debbie Brendan]

Dude, the page charges get paid to the publisher. Publishers do not fund research to any significant degree. They make researchers do their quality control (peer review) for free, charge authors to publish and charge libraries thousands to subscribe to their journal.

They get a lot of money at every turn. They are rich. They are powerful.

[Debbie Brendan]

If most peer reviewers are employed at public institutions, how is the peer review process not paid for with tax dollars?

Do you have any idea what typesetting costs these days? When the article is electronic and formatted by the author and the publishing is electronic?

Server storage costs??? Seriously?

These journals charge HUNDREDS of dollars per page. They charge subscribers THOUSANDS of dollars per year.

What publisher do you work for?

[thedumpsterbear]

As much as I am frustrated with high journal prices, I find this petition misguided. Publishing does cost some money, hence it is unrealistic to demand that it is done for free. IMHO, petitioners should have requested that a publisher cannot prohibit an author making his work freely available online.

[FelipeTerrDe]

Pocha se eu soubesse do que se trata eu até assinava a petição.

Se algum brasileiro souber me responde, Por favor.

[Austin McHenry]

majority in this country) that is published must be submitted into pubmed central 12 months after it is published. 12 months was a brilliant decision, because libraries will not wait 12 months, so they will purchase bulk subscriptions, and the layperson can access the information a little bit later. It's an excellent policy which you guys seem to not be recognizing...

[Austin McHenry]

Of course open access is desirable... but you have to realize that there are already policies in place that grant open access without harming publishers (the peer review process is absolutely essential for quality control... and tax dollars don't pay for that, they also don't pay for formatting, typesetting, and server storage costs...) - in 2008 a national policy was established so that any NIH grant funded research (the vast

[youdavidcarver]

Cats, Boobs, Upvotes, and Boobs