I just saw this on Slashdot: http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/12/12/0457241/White-House-Plans-Open-Access-For-Research?art_pos=1.
Basically, as I understand it, NIH (National Institute of Health) funds a huge amount of medical research, and all research funded by them is required to be archived in a free publicly-accessible way after a certain time period (1 year?). Now people are considering extending that to other sciences. Considering the underlying philosophy behind Sage (that openness and freely-available information is valuable), I figured people here might like to participate in the discussion of (specifically) whether NSF-funded research should be required to do the same as NIH-funded research now. The Slashdot article text is: "Currently, the National Institutes of Health require that research funded by its grants be made available to the public[1] online at no charge within 12 months of publication. Now the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President is launching a 'Public Access Policy Forum' to determine whether this policy should be extended to other science agencies[2] and, if so, how it should be implemented. 'The NIH model has a variety of features that can be evaluated, and there are other ways to offer the public enhanced access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications,' OSTP says in the request for information. 'The best models may [be] influenced by agency mission, the culture and rate of scientific development of the discipline, funding to develop archival capabilities, and research funding mechanisms.' The OSTP will conduct an interactive, online discussion[3] that will focus on three major questions: Should this policy be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be implemented? In what format should the data be submitted in order to make it easy to search and retrieve information? What are the best mechanisms to ensure compliance? 'It's very encouraging to see the Obama Administration focus on ensuring public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research [4, reg. required] as a key way to maximize our collective investment in science,' says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition." [1] http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/11/07/2318208/Bill-to-Require-Open-Access-to-Scientific-Papers [2] http://blog.ostp.gov/2009/12/09/ostp-to-launch-public-forum-on-how-best-to-make-federally-funded-research-available-for-free/ [3] http://blog.ostp.gov/2009/12/10/policy-forum-on-public-access-to-federally-funded-research-implementation/ [4] http://www.genomeweb.com/obamas-open-government-plan-includes-open-access-research-publications Thanks, Jason -- Jason Grout -- To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
