One of our nation’s most important assets is the trove of data produced by federally funded scientists and published in scholarly journals. The question that this Forum will address is: To what extent and under what circumstances should such research articles—funded by taxpayers but with value added by scholarly publishers—be made freely available on the Internet?
The White House is soliciting public feedback on this question through January 7, 2010. More is here.
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as a researcher with a fair number of published papers funded by the US government (20-40 depending on what you want to count), i would like all my papers to be available for free. maybe a year or two waiting. but really the scientific publishing industry (or i guess really the copyright law) needs to be altered in the authors favor
PubMed does it for medical papers, as far as I know. It’s not just about the “where does my money go” principle. The syllogism goes like this: publicly funded research -> useful -> made available to the public. I therefore presume making all forms of sci. research available to all will reinforce the idea that sci. research is useful (take that Coburn).
Same thing is debated in Germany atm.
Also, isn’t this already an NIH requirement? Couldn’t other agencies (NSF, NEH etc.) just do the same?
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