I don't sign petitions, because that type of feel-good inaction is one of the major problems in America today. Instead, I support the efforts of Carl Malamud at public.resource.org and am trying to figure out a way to crowdsource PACER. Admittedly, these efforts differ substantively from the petition's goal of 'liberating' publicly-funded research from the shackles of for-profit corporations, but many of the issues are analogous.<p>The most serious problem with PACER (which is the online docket system for federal courts) is that each 'page' costs the user $0.10, which precludes any meaningful search or analysis of data. I fear that if the government were to provide access to research articles and the like, they may institute similar measures to profit from the availability of this information. I realize that this is an unsubstantiated fear, but it's extremely important to consider how to implement such policies.<p>Remember, these publishers' very existence depends on profiting from access to journal articles. As such, they will literally fight to the death over this issue.
To be clear, the 'require' part of this petition is not targeted at researchers, but at publishers.<p>Publishers want to own their papers' copyrights, and have exclusive publishing rights. The fairness of this is questionable when they aren't paying for the core work done to produce the papers. They apply a lot of pressure to keep research behind paywalls, often against the will of the funders and the researchers. The idea of this petition is to give researchers and government funding agencies some legal strength if they want their work to be freely available.
This was on here before, but when I signed it, it had just barely broken 4k. Great to see it already up to 15k!<p>I am loathe to sign political petitions b/c oftentimes its not very clear to me whether the proposed change does not have any unforeseen negative repercussions.<p>I can't see how this could be a bad thing. As taxpayers we are already paying for the research. Why should we have to pay a private corporation yet again (or fund the costs for our public universities to pay for them)?
Even though not a single petition has been taken seriously so far, I think this one actually has a decent shot. If Obama acts were to actually act on one of them before the next election then this one probably has the best chance because it's a relatively small change, and it probably wouldn't be excessively controversial.