The day after Christmas, President Bush signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), part of which contained a mandate for all research funded by the National Institutes of Health to be made publicly accessible within a year of publication in the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. This is huge news for many reasons, as SPARC’s Peter Suber notes, in particular because

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.

Read Students for Free Culture board member Gavin Baker’s analysis of the bill’s passage and the NIH’s subsequent policy changes.

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:

FreeCulture.org is a lead sponsor of the new Petition for Public Access to Publicly Funded Research in the United States, along with the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and several library and consumer groups. The petition specifically calls for the reintroduction and passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act in the 110th Congress.

Please show your support by adding your signature.

P.S. I don’t think I ever blogged my letter to the editor in response to the Washington Post’s article about the National Day of Action for Open Access, but it was published and is available here.

Get ready! Thursday, Feb. 15 is the National Day of Action for Open Access. Several of our chapters across the country will be hosting events — here they are:

• University of Florida (Gainesville, FL)
  Tabling: 11 am - 3 pm, Reitz Union Colonnade
  Panel: 7 pm, CSE room E221 (co-sponsored with UAEM)
  Speakers: Gavin Baker, Free Culture; Ashley Wills, UAEM; Stephanie Haas, Digital Library Center
  Contact: Gavin Baker
• University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA)
  Panel: 3 pm, Annenberg Center for Communication, 734 West Adams Blvd.
  Speakers: Cory Doctorow, Sasha Chock
  Contact: Cameron Parkins
• Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA)
  Tabling: during lunch and dinner, top of dining hall (Sharples)
  Panel: 7:30 pm, Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall
  Contact: Nicholas LaRacuente
• Emory University (Atlanta, GA)
  Event: 4:30 pm, press conference at Woodruff Library North Entrance
  Contact: Brian Pitts
• Emerson College (Boston, MA)
  Tabling: 11:30 am - 12:30 pm, around 80 Boylston St.
  Contact: Erin O’Brien
• Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
  Event: Handing out Open Access bookmarks to students throughout the day and distributing them to Harvard’s major libraries. Holding a forum the following week and submitting an Op-ed to the Harvard Crimson.
  Contact: Elizabeth Stark
• MIT (Cambridge, MA)
  Event: Placing pricetags on journals at the MIT libraries and distributing Open Access Bookmarks to students and libraries throughout the day.
  Contact: Mako Hill
• Northeastern University (Boston, MA)
  Event: Handing out Open Access Bookmarks to students and distributing to libraries throughout the day.
  Tabling: 2-4 pm, Main Library
  Contact: Christopher Budnick
• University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA)
  Tabling: 11 am - 1:30 pm, Locust Walk
  Contact: Steve McLaughlin
• Reed College (Portland, OR)
  Tabling: 11:30 am - 2:30 pm, in front of the cafeteria
  Contact: Max Berger
• Chadwick School (Palos Verdes Peninsula, CA)
  Tabling: 12:30 - 1:45 pm, Main deck (outside Christensen)
  Contact: D. Parker Phinney
• New York University (New York, NY)
  Will publish audio/video from the Taking Action on Open Access event.
  Contact: Fred Benenson

The following chapters have also said they’d be participating — contact them for details:

• University of Evansville (Evansville, IN)
  Contact: Andy Scudder
• Franklin & Marshall College (Lancaster, PA)
  Contact: Ben DeRogatis
• Hamilton College (Clinton, NY)
  Contact: David Riordan
• Claremont Colleges (Claremont, CA)
  Contact: Karen Rustad
• Columbia University (New York, NY)
  Contact: Brendan Ballou
• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC)
  Contact: Erin Watson

Hi.

We are not radicals. Sorry Washington Post, you’ve just got us pegged wrong.

Our philosophy is founded in decades of legal scholarship. That’s why people like Larry Lessig support us. We may dramatize the issues to help them connect with students, but we are far from radical.

On the contrary, this demonstrates the breadth of the consensus in favor of public access. From the staid librarians to kooky little us. It is the publishing companies, who want something for nothing, that are the special interest, as Peter Suber points out:

Do supporters of national OA mandates like FRPAA want something for nothing? No. We want something for something. Crawford is forgetting that taxpayers have already paid for the underlying research and that publishers pay nothing to receive the written results. Yes, publishers add value to those results. But if publishers and taxpayers both make a contribution to the value of peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly-funded research, then what’s the best way to split this baby? The FRPAA solution is a reasonable compromise: a period of exclusivity for the publisher followed by free online access for the public. If the AAP wants to block OA mandates per se, rather than just negotiate the embargo period, then it’s saying that it wants no compromise, that the public should get nothing for its investment, and that publishers should control access to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers. I’d call that getting something for nothing.

All Scooby Doo references aside: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

UPDATE: Note that this is exactly in line with the strategy the publishers bought from the “pit bull,” i.e. “if the other side is on the defensive, it doesn’t matter if they can discredit your statements.” It is my intent to remain on the offensive and to discredit their statements.

I am proud to announce FreeCulture.org’s participation in the National Day of Action for Open Access on Feb. 15.

Together with the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, we are organizing the day to highlight students’ stake in the debate about access to research. We’re encouraging our chapters to take action on their campus to raise awareness at their school.

Read the press release here.

(FreeCulture.org is a member of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.)

FreeCulture.org has joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, which supports open public access to taxpayer-funded research. We join other student groups such as Universities Allied for Essential Medicines and the American Medical Student Association as members, along with a long list of universities, libraries, patients, and public interest groups.

Our reasons for joining are two-fold:

1. As the leading group of student advocates for the public interest in intellectual property and information & communications technology, we recognize access to research as a defining issue for our generation. Public access will lead to faster cures and treatments for disease, improve scholarship and research, and promote development. Whether it’s brilliant photos of space, GIS data, or scholarly journal articles, the people have a right to what they pay for. Access to publicly-funded research, and open access generally, is simply the right thing to do.
2. As students, we work with academic research all the time. After all, who isn’t required to write a research paper at some time or another? Whether it’s a term paper or a doctoral dissertation, scholarship always builds on the past. That requires access to the work of those who’ve come before us.

FreeCulture.org is proud to support the alliance’s work on behalf of the Federal Research Public Access Act and other efforts. Here at the University of Florida, we worked with the Student Senate to pass a resolution supporting FRPAA and open access — and succeeded. We hope to work with ATA to provide more information and resources to engage students on the issue in the future.

Attention free content creators and wikimaniacs alike: Freeculture.org is co-sponsoring the Wikimania Awards in conjunction with the 2006 Wikimania Conference taking place in Cambridge, MA on August 4-6, 2006. (Shout out to all that would like to attend the conference: register here.)

The Wikimania Awards were created to promote the creation of excellent free content around the world. The authors of such content have made millions of ad-hoc collages, designs, and art exhibits possible. Awards will be given to the best entries in each of nine categories, covering video, animation, audio, photography, and drawing.

Entries must be suitable for some Wikimedia-related project, and must be released under free licenses such as the GFDL or Creative Commons BY-SA or Public Domain Dedication. The full set of rules and submission information is available here.

The closing date for all submissions aside from those created en route to/at the conference is August 1, 2006, so don’t delay. There will be an international and (cyber) star-studded set of judges, along with some great prizes and exposure for the winning entries!

Two big stories this week in the quest toward open access in scientific research and publishing:

• An editorial in the estimeed science magazine Nature, “Let data speak to data”, calls for open access to research databases. Notably, they specifically suggest Creative Commons licenses for research data.
• First Monday, one of the oldest open access peer-reviewed journals, is celebrating its 10th birthday next year with a special issue and conference. The subject: “the issues involved in building sustainable models for openness in science, software and content.” Sounds hefty to me; I can’t wait to see the conclusions, and I encourage anyone interested to submit. Deadline is 6 February 2006.

Of course, Peter Suber’s Open Access News is the (in-depth) blog of record for news about open access. To learn more about open access, see Peter’s excellent overview.