Wikipedia:Access2Research

Access2Research (Wikipedia article) is a group campaigning for free and open access to research funded by U.S. taxpayers. They are behind the White House petition that the Wikimedia Foundation is supporting. The petition seeks to ensure via a mandate that research produced with United States federal funding can be accessed, free of charge, by anyone. The Wikimedia Foundation fully supports this goal, and the petition at the heart of it. (Read more about the context of this initiative.)

CC-BY licensed Access2Research video by SPARC.

Why this matters

This campaign aims to ensure public access to research, and to empower people to educate themselves and better the world around them. The Wikimedia mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." We support the availability of educational content under free licenses, including modern research. This campaign furthers our mission and helps our community.

Contributors to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects rely on access to reliable sources. Our community's goal is to produce accurate, verifiable content that reflects the true state of the world's knowledge. Toward this end, our volunteers use information from journals, books, newspapers, and other trusted sources to build the articles that almost 500 million readers rely on each month. When those citations are freely accessible online, this also permits our readers to verify the information they find cited in our projects. We try to make our processes and citations tranparent so that anyone can see for themselves that the information is correct—or fix it if it isn't. If we want readers to be able to do this, they must to be able to access the sources of that information freely whenever possible. And if we want these articles to be there at all, we need our volunteers to be able to access that information in the first place. Currently, open access publications serve as references for thousands of Wikipedia articles (see, for example, citations of open access articles from Biomed Central or the Public Library of Science).

The campaign will help communication within the community of scholars, too. Studies of the "FUTON bias" have found that papers with full text available on the internet are more likely to be read and cited by other scholars.

Supporting this petition

Wikimedia Foundation staff, board members, and Wikimedia volunteers participated in a discussion about how best to support this initiative, and collaboratively edited the public blog post. The input of those who have actively worked on issues of open access to scholarly content was particularly sought out. The Wikimedia Foundation endorses the petition and encourage individual Wikimedians to sign as well, but respects that some members of our community may disagree with it.

Because the petition involves executive, not legislative, action, there is no problem with regard to legislative or political activity for non-profits under U.S. law.

Ways to help

If you're interested in the issues and want to help make such research free to access, the most important thing is to sign the petition - and ask your friends, family and co-workers to sign it too. The more signatures it gets, the more seriously it will get taken.

You can also join Wikiproject Open Access to help improve articles on open access-related topics on this Wikipedia, or start a similar initiative in other languages or on other Wikimedia projects.

Timeline for support: through June 20

The petition was launched on May 20. The White House will give an official response to any petition that gets over 25,000 signatures in 30 days; it's important to build awareness early to demonstrate public support, and we want to add our voice to the organized efforts of the other endorsers of the petition.

When does the Wikimedia Foundation take public positions on policy issues?

The Wikimedia Foundation has supported open access declarations in the past, including the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities and the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

Our projects are run and written by volunteers. The Foundation will take positions where issues directly impact the ability of volunteers to do this valuable work.

Others supporting this petition

To date, the petition has been signed by thousands of individuals and endorsed by organizations such as open access publishers, open knowledge and open science organizations, health policy organizations, online research communities, universities and academic libraries (organizations that supported the launch of the petition on the first day are marked in bold):

• Academia.edu [1]
• The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) [2]
• The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) [3]
• The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) [4]
• Arizona State University Libraries [5]
• BioSharing [6]
• The Center for Scholarly Communication and Digital Curation at Northwestern University [7]
• The Cost of Knowledge [8]
• Creative Commons [9]
• Figshare [10]
• GeneticAlliance [11]
• Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) [12]
• InTechWeb [13]
• Lybba [14]
• Mendeley [15]
• Open Access Directory [16]
• The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) [17]
• The Open Science Federation [18]
• PatientsLikeMe [19]
• The Public Library of Science (PLoS) [20]
• RockHealth [21]
• Sage Bionetworks [22]
• The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) [23]

• Also see the longer etherpad list of organizational supporters of the petition.

References

• "White House petition for open access to research". Slashdot. 21 May 2012. Retrieved 25 May 2012.
• Taylor, Mike (22 May 2012). "US petition could tip the scales in favour of open access publishing". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 May 2012.
• Howard, Jennifer (23 May 2012). "Petition urges White House to Require public access to federally financed research". Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 25 May 2012.
• Arbesman, Samuel (23 May 2012). "A Petition for Free Online Access of Taxpayer-funded Research". Wired. Retrieved 25 May 2012.