The key language notes that the Whitehouse has "issued a memorandum today [...] to Federal agencies that directs those with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication."
This suggestion is similar to the NIH public access policy (adopted in 2008), which requires the results of NIH-funded research to be made freely available within 12 months of publication. The new memorandum gives agencies some freedom in how they respond - they don't need to adopt exactly the NIH policy - but it is clearly in the same spirit.
Suber focuses on the connection to FASTR, a major piece of open access legislation introduced into Congress a few days ago. Broadly, FASTR has a lot of overlap with the White House directive. FASTR would require every Federal agency with a budget over 100 million to adopt an open access policy. A significant difference - and one that I expect is of interest to HN - is that FASTR has provisions to enable text mining. That would potentially be of interest to some startups. Much more info here:
It is also of interest to follow the responses from John Wilbanks and Heather Joseph, two of the authors of the petition (and long-time advocates for open access):
Wilbanks notes that the memo covers research from "NSF, Ed, EPA, NASA, USDA, HHS, Commerce, Interior, Defense, Energy, Trans, DHS, Ag, State, Smithsonian". He also implies that while this memo is great progress, it falls short of a full open access mandate enabling reuse and text-mining of content.
In the case of FASTR, I don't think there's anything in there about it being retroactive. Certainly there's not for the existing NIH policy. In the case of the Whitehouse Directive, I suppose individual agencies could decide to adopt a retroactive policy. But I don't think such a policy is being prescribed.
Thank you. The reason I ask is because many of the articles that I am currently reading or need to read are those that were published prior to the existence of FASTR, in particular recent papers published between, say, the 1920s and 2010s. In due time, these articles that are locked away will be less referenced, but in the mean time I am left scratching my head... will we just try to forget that this terrible plague ever happened to science, and re-publish as much as possible?
>I suppose individual agencies could decide to adopt a retroactive policy.
I don't think they could. If they've already signed a contract to fund a project, they can't just decide to change the rules. This will only count going forward.
The chances are zero. There is no way for the government to retroactively change the terms and conditions of contracts and grants that were executed long ago.
Or just retroactively reduce the lengths of copyright terms. After all, they retroactively increase the lengths of those terms all the time, so why can they not reduce them as well? The constitution explicitly requires copyrights to expire, but makes no specific mention of what the minimum or maximum terms are.
Then some billionaires need to buy Elvesier et al and do so. That for my money, would be one of the best things to happen to science as the result of profit.
I'm not sure if this is a fantastic development. Placing a copy of the journal article on the agency website is cheap, but the burden of opening the data is going to be costly. This may cut funds available for subsequent research due to reallocation of the funds to opening the research to the public.
This suggestion is similar to the NIH public access policy (adopted in 2008), which requires the results of NIH-funded research to be made freely available within 12 months of publication. The new memorandum gives agencies some freedom in how they respond - they don't need to adopt exactly the NIH policy - but it is clearly in the same spirit.
Here's an analysis from Peter Suber, a leading advocate of open access: https://plus.google.com/109377556796183035206/posts/8hzviMJe...
Suber focuses on the connection to FASTR, a major piece of open access legislation introduced into Congress a few days ago. Broadly, FASTR has a lot of overlap with the White House directive. FASTR would require every Federal agency with a budget over 100 million to adopt an open access policy. A significant difference - and one that I expect is of interest to HN - is that FASTR has provisions to enable text mining. That would potentially be of interest to some startups. Much more info here:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Notes_on_the_Fair_Access_t...
If you'd like to support open access, take a few minutes to look at the Alliance for Taxpayer Access's (ATA) call to action on FASTR:
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/FASTR_calltoaction.shtm...
It is also of interest to follow the responses from John Wilbanks and Heather Joseph, two of the authors of the petition (and long-time advocates for open access):
https://twitter.com/wilbanks
https://twitter.com/hjoseph
Wilbanks notes that the memo covers research from "NSF, Ed, EPA, NASA, USDA, HHS, Commerce, Interior, Defense, Energy, Trans, DHS, Ag, State, Smithsonian". He also implies that while this memo is great progress, it falls short of a full open access mandate enabling reuse and text-mining of content.