There’s a petition that began recently to ask the White House to require academic and scientific research funded by federal dollars to be made available for all to read free of charge. This is called open access publishing, and support for open access has been growing in the scholarly and library community over the past several decades.
Here at the City Tech Library we’re big fans of open access publishing, and have held many events over the years. We’ve even pledged to publish our own research open access whenever possible. When research is published open access everyone — students, patients, researchers who don’t work at a wealthy university, you, and me — can read it free of charge, and use it to teach, learn, and innovate.
Help support open access to federally-funded research! Head over to the White House website and sign the petition. The petition has until June 19th to reach 25,000 signatures, which guarantees an official response from the Administration (which is currently considering a bill called the Federal Research Public Access Act).
For more details about the issues surrounding open access publishing, check out this short video, and great website. There’s also the open access publishing network on the CUNY Academic Commons — if you’re interested in more discussion and action about open access publishing, please join us!
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