del-fi • White House Public Access Policy Is Out

"The White House has published a response to our We the People petition, commonly known as the OA Monday petition. I’ll have a longer post up once I’ve had time to thoroughly review the policy, but the multi-year campaign to turn the NIH public access policy into something that applied to the entire federal research system is over. I’d like to thank the White House, especially the Office of Science and Technology policy, for listening to us through the various RFIs and then finally to the petition. This is good policy. And it’s nice to see something substantive emerge from the We the People platform, too. To the squeals of the publishers, I say only this. Jobs will be created by open content. I personally built a company years ago on the open data published by the NIH. I’m looking forward to watching others build companies on the open literature that will emerge under this policy. And the fight’s not over - it won’t be until we have reuse rights, not just free downloads. But for now, let’s dance.  We won."