Petition to "require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research."

Here's a worthy petition on the WhiteHouse.Gov site:

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.
We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.
The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.

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mesocosm

Cory, I am so grateful that you’re bringing attention to this issue. Academic publishing is a horrible racket, and harms society.
http://www.facebook.com/janjamm Jan Angevine

Harvard just recently unsubscribed to all the Elsevier journals. Harvard’s subscription costs had risen to millions of dollars. It is a bizarre mess. First, scientists are charged to publish their research, which goes through the publisher’s peer review process for which no one is paid. Then the institutions that did the research are charged tens of thousands of dollars to subscribe to the publications their researchers are charged for publishing in. It is one of the biggest scams going. The fact that most of the research is tax payer funded makes it all the more ludicrous that they are prevented from accessing it.
Bill Noble

I’m having multiple problems with the whitehouse.gov site and have so far been unable to sign the petition.
- Mike Taylor
  
  I’m sorry the site is misbehaving, Bill. Please persist — this is an important issue for us all. For background on why, see my article Academic Publishing Is Broken at http://the-scientist.com/2012/03/19/opinion-academic-publishing-is-broken/
Andrew Kane

That site is very badly broken, just as it was when last I tried to sign a petition there several weeks ago. It’s sad that the White House apparently can’t find someone capable of managing a Drupal site. They should have hired me!
- Andrew Kane
  
  Ah, never mind, I managed to get it to work in Chromium. I think ’twas my Firefox setting that broke it. (Firefox is set paranoid, Chromium permissive.)
  - Mike Taylor
    
    Thank you for persisting! Making a difference. We’re now approaching 10,000 signatures in the first two days. Please let your friends know about this, too!
http://www.facebook.com/NickJacksonScott Nick J-s

What point is there in broadening our collective sphere of knowledge if that knowledge is not accessible to us all?
Virgil22

Errr… such a system already exists. It’s called PubMed Central. Any research funded by NIH has to be made publicly available. It’s been like this for about 4 years now. Sure, Elsevier tried to quash it with their “research works act”, but that was abandoned after bad publicity. Why the need for this petition?