In accordance with our new bylaws, Students for Free Culture is having an election for a new board of directors.
The candidates, in alphabetical order:
Brendan Ballou, Columbia University
Fred Benenson, New York University*
Kevin Driscoll, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Christina Ducruet, Brown University
Jan Hendrik Grahl, University of Florida
Nicholas LaRacuente, Swarthmore College
Ben Mazer, Swarthmore College
Hani Morsi, The American University in Cairo
Nelson Pavlosky, George Mason University School of Law*
Parker Phinney, Chadwick School
Karen Rustad, Claremont Colleges*
Elizabeth Stark, Harvard Law School*
*incumbent
Chapter liaisons will be casting their votes between now and February 3. You can read the candidates’ platforms and their responses to questions during one of our IRC debates.
The NIH is the world’s largest funder of scientific research (not counting classified military research). Its budget last year, $28 billion, was larger than the gross domestic product of 142 nations. As my colleague Ray English points out, it’s more than five times larger than all seven of the Research Councils UK combined. NIH-funded research results in 65,000 peer-reviewed articles every year or 178 every day. … Its OA mandate will not only free up an unprecedented quantity of high-quality medical research. It will also make a giant step toward cultivating new expectations –among researchers, funders, governments, and voters– that publicly-funded research should be OA.
Around the same time, the European Research Council also released its guidelines for open access, which affirm academia’s principles of sharing knowledge as widely as possible and make open access mandatory for all ERC-funded research.
Of course, there’s still work to be done. The federal government funds plenty of research through agencies other than the NIH, not to mention research not funded by the government at all. The yearlong embargo in getting the latest medical research is also less than ideal. But this is still a great step forward, one which will hopefully encourage other agencies and individual academics to release their research freely.
Students for Free Culture is proud to have participated, along with many of its member chapters and other organizations, in last February’s National Open Access Day of Action to raise awareness of access to research issues among students and pressure congresspeople to support HR 2764.
Also, the winner of SPARC’s viral video contest, of which I was a judge, was announced at last weekend’s American Library Association Midwinter Meeting. Check it out:
