Open and Shut?: Open Access: The People’s Petition

Use the link to access the interview with OA advocate John Wilbanks, senior fellow in entrepreneurship at the Ewing Kauffman Foundation.  The introduction to the interview reads as follows: “Earlier this month a group of Open Access (OA) advocates flew to Washington to attend a meeting with the US Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP). Their objective was to convince OSTP that it is vital the US government ensures that all publicly-funded research is made freely available on the Internet.  The omens seemed good: at the end of last year the OSTP had issued an RFI on Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting from Federally Funded Research, and the Obama Administration has been making positive noises about OA for a while now... the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) — had been introduced in both US houses that would have the reverse effect of the RWA. If passed, it would  propagate the NIH policy to a dozen or so other US federal agencies, and reduce the current NIH embargo from 12 months to six... To cap it all, says John Wilbanks, a senior fellow in entrepreneurship at the Ewing Kauffman Foundation, and one of the group that travelled to Washington, the meeting appeared to go well. ‘They listened to us, they clearly had studied the issues...’  Flying home to the West Coast on a redeye, however, Wilbanks began to experience a nagging feeling that their job was not complete... ‘And it hit me — us, because I was with Mike Carroll, Mike Rossner, and Heather Joseph — that the redeyes and the meetings and the arguing were not carrying the day,’  Wilbanks explained on this blog. ‘We needed to do something else.’  That something else became an initiative called Access2Research. The objective was to engage the public in the discussions about OA.  The best way of engaging the people, it was decided, was to launch a petition on the ‘We the People’ site — which was introduced on whitehouse.gov by the US government last September — and invite the public to sign it.  The petition — which went live on the night of 20^th May... In order to receive a response from the US government the petition must attract 25,000 signatures within 30 days (i.e. 19^th June). But here too the omens are good: within the first two and a half days the petition had attracted half the number of signatures necessary, with roughly 200 being added every hour.  At the time of writing the number stands at 16,443, two thirds of the way there, yet with 24 days still to run... In fact, calling on people to make a public statement in support of OA is a long-standing tradition within the movement... In 2001, for instance, the Budapest Open Access Initiative attracted over 5,600 signatures... The previous year (2000) an initiative called the Public Library of Science (PLoS) had garnered 34,000 signatures in support of OA... Collecting signatures in support of OA came back with a vengeance earlier this year, when researchers were asked to boycott Elsevier for its support of the RWA by signing a pledge at the