
Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research - jacoblyles
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-free-access-over-internet-scientific-journal-articles-arising-taxpayer-funded-research/wDX82FLQ
======
riprock
This needs to also happen for case law (free as in beer). How absurd is this:

"Pursuant to common law tradition, the courts of California have developed a
large body of case law through the decisions of the Supreme Court of
California and the California Courts of Appeal. The state supreme court's
decisions are published in official reporters known as California Reports. The
decisions of the Courts of Appeal are published in the California Appellate
Reports.

The content of both reporters is compiled and edited by the California
Reporter of Decisions. The Reporter maintains a contract with a private
publisher (as allowed by Government Code Section 68903) who in turn is
responsible for actually publishing and selling the official reporters. The
current official publisher is LexisNexis." [0]

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_California> [0]

<http://www.lexisnexis.com/clients/CACourts/> [1]

~~~
anigbrowl
Yeah, but all those reports are freely available online from the courts
websites. The publishers just publish them in paperbound form.

~~~
riprock
Can you provide a link? I am not a lawyer, but I have seen
<http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions-slip.htm> which provides a link to the
LexisNexis website for opinions from 1850 - Present.

The LexisNexis website also states "There is no charge to search, retrieve or
save documents from the California Official Reports Web site, and there is no
copyright on opinion text. The site, however, is for personal, not commercial,
use."

From this, I assumed commercial use would require purchasing or licensing
something from LexisNexis.

~~~
anigbrowl
This is new in the last few months. I think you can do what you want with the
opinions, but you can't build it on top of their servers.

------
RichardPrice
Academia.edu was very active in working with the White House to spread the
word about this petition when it first came out, and getting signatures for
the petition to hit the 25k threshold.

The White House hasn't responded to it because initially they were busy with
the election, and then with the fiscal cliff, and now with gun reform. Getting
more signatures on the petition now will help them see that people care about
this topic.

~~~
pmorici
Then how do you explain them having time for this;
[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-
resp...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-
youre-looking)

~~~
RichardPrice
In practice that death star response probably only took an hour or two to
write. However, figuring out federal policy on research is really tricky, and
there are many stakeholders.

The fundamental problem is that the White House would like all research to be
open, but every time they take any steps in that direction, they get whacked
over the head in the media by the journal industry, and get called job-
killers. The journal industry's argument is that any attempt to open up
research will reduce their revenues, and kill jobs.

The view of most people in this debate is that the journal industry makes far
too much money off research, and therefore the size of the industry should be
reduced. But in this economic context being branded as a job killer is toxic.

The White House really wants to turn the debate around, and argue that open
access for research is a stimulus for jobs: it will create more jobs, not
fewer. To argue for that requires marshaling arguments and data from the
private sector to establish that if people have access to federally-funded
research, that will help them in their lives, and those benefits will outweigh
the costs that the journal industry may experience.

~~~
SkyMarshal
_> The White House really wants to turn the debate around, and argue that open
access for research is a stimulus for jobs: it will create more jobs, not
fewer. To argue for that requires marshaling arguments and data from the
private sector to establish that if people have access to federally-funded
research, that will help them in their lives, and those benefits will outweigh
the costs that the journal industry may experience._

Do they have a team working on this, and is there any form of crowdsourcing
being used to marshall this data?

~~~
RichardPrice
It's a good question. I expect that the Office of Science and Technology is
working on it to some extent, but I am not aware of how deep their efforts
are.

------
thorum
The White House hasn't had time to respond to this petition because they've
been busy responding to more important ones - like "begin construction of a
Death Star by 2016".

[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-
resp...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-response-
youre-looking)

~~~
kencausey
Have you ever heard of prioritization? One of the factors of prioritizing is
the 'time of completion'.

------
chimeracoder
I'm confused - this link seems to be for a petition that's several months old,
already past the deadline, and already reached the threshold number of
signatures?

And more confusingly, there's no response to it either. Am I missing
something?

~~~
randomwalker
That is correct, and many people are upset about the lack of response
<https://twitter.com/mattblaze/status/290503781093871616>

~~~
madaxe
It's hard to respond to petitions about real issues, because it requires you
to do something.

Death Stars, however, make for good PR without actually doing anything.

------
short_circut
This would be nice but how is this going to be payed for? Research budgets are
already being squeezed pretty tight given how much the sponsoring organization
takes(universities ...), research costs, and congressional attempts to cut
funding I just don't see it happening anytime soon. It already costs quite a
bit to publish.

edit: Just to give an idea of the costs>
[http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.h...](http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.html)

~~~
jacoblyles
PLoS and arxiv seem to have figured it out. Require federally funded research
to be posted on a similar platform.

~~~
af3
arxiv is not peer-reviewed.

~~~
jlgreco
PLoS is.

~~~
streptomycin
And it costs thousands of dollars to publish a paper there.

~~~
jlgreco
Yes, and? The price to publish with PLoS is not meant to be a barrier; they
will wave the fee if you cannot afford it.

~~~
streptomycin
Not many people waive the fee currently. If a lot of people did, it would be a
huge problem for publishers like PLoS and they would have to change their
practices.

Assuming that won't happen, then if all publications were open access, there
would be a lot more grant money that would have to be spent on publishing fees
rather than research. That was the point the guy we originally replied to was
making <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052476> so citing PLoS as an
example isn't really meaningful. It's just an example of precisely the issue
he was raising, not a rebuttal.

------
DanielBMarkham
This is one of those things that for the life of me I don't understand why we
have to petition our government. Why in the heck wouldn't you set it up this
way to begin with?

~~~
mayneack
Because before you set it up, you don't know there's a problem. Sure, you can
say that everyone should get access to the research from the start, but when
the framework for federal grants started, the cost of distributing journals
was tied to shipping physical copies. No one had to think about whether or not
you could legally share it because you had a much higher barrier in the
logistics of sharing it. Now those things are still around through
organizational inertia. The companies that existed to fill the (necessary)
service of printing and shipping all these things don't want to become
obsolete. It's not a good reason to keep it around, but it's why you need more
than zero effort to change.

~~~
icelancer
I agree. It's not an unreasonable thing to have to bring to the government's
attention considering how quickly technology allowed for these advancements to
occur.

It is ridiculous that the response is taking forever and that they sought time
to tell people why the death star isn't going to be built.

~~~
csense
> they sought time to tell people why the death star isn't going to be built.

There is no political fallout from refusing to build a death star.

The Republican Party's rapid backpedaling after publishing a memo outlining
what many HN'ers consider a reasonable policy stance on copyright -- to the
extent of firing the staffer who prepared it, never mind that it appears he
got permission from the appropriate party channels to publish it as a policy
document -- show that the copyright lobby has on its side some of the finest
politicians that money can buy.

------
InclinedPlane
How many such petitions have there been that have been popular enough to
warrant a response? 100? Of those, how many have led to actual changes in
policy? Has there been any example of a successful whitehouse.gov petition?

Why do people keep doing these? They're worse than useless. Send letters,
don't shout into the void.

------
pm24601
Ask that the US Attorney Carmen Ortiz be removed:
[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-
stat...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-
district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck)

Carmen Ortiz is planning on running for Massachusetts Governor so if you live
in Massachusetts OR if you know any one who lives in massachusetts spread the
word about Carmen Ortiz.

------
graywh
The NIH has been working hard at getting all NIH-funded research publications
into a free database, PubMed Central. And I'm pretty sure all publications
listed on CVs for NIH grant applications must include a PubMed Central ID.

~~~
jacoblyles
Pubmed is great.

------
somid3
just signed the petition, I get the feeling that if this gets pushed to every
@mit.edu email address one could easily get more signatures.

------
linuxfault
53,790 signed so far!

