A community-driven petition calling for the Obama Administration to open up the results of taxpayer-funded scientific research by making journal articles freely available online has opened remarkably strong. The petition, which calls for Public Access to all Federally Funded Research, was posted to the White House “We the People” website just two and half days ago, with the aim of securing 25,000 signatures within 30 days.
As of this afternoon, a remarkable 12,500+ people have signed the petition – at the rate of about 200 new signatures each hour. Researchers, patients groups, universities, libraries, students, businesses and families have all thrown their support behind this simple yet powerful idea – to make taxpayer-funded research freely accessible to the public
A broad range of Open Access supporters, including SPARC, are working to spread the word far and wide using email, a tweets, Facebook shares, blog postings – and even online videos.
Tweets on the petition (many using hashtags #openaccess and #OAMonday) have included encouragement for people to sign the petition from thought-leaders including Jimmy Wales (Founder, Wikipedia), Tim O’Reilly (Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media) and Larry Lessig (Founder, Creative Commons).
