White House Petition For Open Access To Research 60
dstates writes "You paid for it, you should be able to read the results of publicly funded research. The National Institutes of Health have had a very successful open access mandate requiring that the results of federally funded biomedical research be published in open access journals. Now there is a White House petition to broaden this mandate. This is a jobs issue. Startups and midsize business need access to federally funded technology research. It is a health care issue, patients and community health providers need access, not a few scientists in well funded research institutes, and even wealthy institutions like Harvard are finding the prices of proprietary journals unsustainable."
Fuck these petitions (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the highest ranked petitions on the site called on the President to advocate for the regulation of Cannabis [whitehouse.gov] in a manner similar to alcohol. The administrations response [norml.org] did not mention alcohol once. Further, it was written by the drug czar, who is legally required to oppose any measures that would legalize Cannabis.
Don't think for a moment that anyone is listening to your petition. This is a marketing tool for the president to co-opt your issue. If he can respond to a few unimportant petitions, he gets to claim that he listens to "the people", while ignoring anything that's really important.
For example, after the debacle I described above, someone created a petition for the president to take these petitions seriously. It got the requisite peitions and got a response [whitehouse.gov]. They gave some examples of how the petitions influenced policy. Among them were banning puppy mills, digitizing federal records, and a "conversation" on online piracy. Not exactly heavy hitting issues here.
"The People" have absolutely no say on anything that matters in this country. Fuck these petitions, and fuck this president.