Discussion -- Should US taxpayer funded research be open access (FRPAA 2012)

Use the link above to access all of the comments made by participants in the thread. The conversation took place on the FluTrackers Pandemic Forum. FluTrackers is an “International Charity investigating infectious diseases.” The current OA thread was framed as follows “The US congress is considering legislation (Federal Research Public Access Act of 2012 - FRPAA) that all research funded by US taxpayer dollars be made available online for free, for everyone. Background Information on FRPAA (link): ‘Congress last week introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2012 (FRPAA), a bill that would mandate free public online access to taxpayer-funded research for all federal agencies with extramural research budgets over $100 million. The bill was introduced in identical versions in both the House and the Senate, staking out a position counter to the publisher-backed Research Works Act (RWA), a bill that would bar federal agencies from requiring public access as a condition of funding. It is the third time FRPAA has been introduced since 2006. . . . If passed, FRPAA would require that each taxpayer-funded manuscript, whether funded whole or in part, be deposited in a government-maintained digital archive, and that each final paper be made freely available to the public online, no later than six months after the article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal... PLoS (Public Library of Science), one of the premier publishers of open access journals, posted an editorial yesterday calling for the US public to support this legislation. In part, PLoS states (link): ‘We invite you to take part in a campaign of direct action to let congress know that we support broader access to research. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) has many different ways for you to get involved (and they make it easy to participate): Ask your representative to co-sponsor FRPAA... Thank the representatives that re-introduced the bill... Ask your organization to write a letter in support of the bill or make a public statement about it... Sign the ATA petition... Show everyone that you care by displaying the I support Public Access banner... Like SPARC’s Facebook Page and follow them on Twitter, then share with your friends and followers... Remember, the more you do the more congress will know how we feel, so let’s get busy in support of FRPAA!‘ For-profit scientific journals and publications want to restrict access to this publicly funded research and charged outrageous fees to view these research articles and data. If my tax dollars are paying for this research, then I ought to be able to view them for free without paying additional costs to some private publishing company. What do you think?”