[BOAI] Knowledge generated by government funding should be freely available: e-petition

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from John Kirriemuir.  Note that only UK citizens may sign the
petition.  --Peter Suber.]


Please consider supporting the following e-petition, on the UK government
petition website at:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/16041

There's positive ramifications for repositories i.e. researchers are going
to need somewhere to put all that knowledge and make it freely available.

The text of the petition reads:

+ + + + +

Most of the research in UK universities and colleges is funded by the
taxpayer through the government. However, the knowledge generated by this is
often controlled by publishers who charge significant amounts of money,
often hundreds or thousands of pounds per individual journal, for access.

These charges put severe pressure on university funding, which mostly comes
from (again) the taxpayer and student fees. Research suffers as academics
lose access, on cost grounds, to research in their field. Members of the
public cannot afford access to knowledge they have indirectly funded.

Despite many initiatives to make this taxpayer-funded knowledge openly
accessible, most of it is still “locked” away in high cost publications.

Publications and knowledge generated by research funded through the
government, unless genuinely sensitive (e.g. military or atomic
development), should be freely available, in their entirety, within a year.
This should be a condition of research funding.

+ + + + +

A few links to background information can be found at:

http://is.gd/FreeKnowledge

Thank you.
John Kirriemuir
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/boai-forum/attachments/20110907/5c1696e3/attachment-0001.html