Gerry Smith writes in his article for the Huffington Post that the Obama administration just granted Aaron Swart's wish by directing federal agencies on Friday to make the results of federally-funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy wrote on Feb. 22, "in a policy memorandum released today, OSTP Director John Holdren has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research."
The memorandum was addressed to "the heads of executive departments and agencies" which "with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures" (Dr. John Holdren).
The memorandum was addressed to "the heads of executive departments and agencies" which "with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures" (Dr. John Holdren).
"In a 2008 manifesto, Swartz said sharing information was a 'moral imperative' and advocated for 'civil disobedience' against copyright laws pushed by corporations 'blinded by greed' that led to the 'privatization of knowledge.'" Smith writes of Swartz. #PDFtribute
Some people marvel that this was not done earlier. As the reddit thread on the Huffington article put it, "Whenever you hear Republicans say they want to privatize a piece of the government, what they are really saying, is that they want tax payers to fund a private monopoly." - "I don't think this type of thing is limited to Republicans, unfortunately." - "Greed doesn't have a single party. It's all-inclusive." - "And it's global."
I don't think I agree that the whole issue itself started out of greed. In a time when information simply could not be shared as easily, or as cheaply, publishing and sharing (printing journals or books) would have been an expensive process. I wonder if, when government-funded research only resided in libraries, they allowed the public to access them for free.
Now the problem of sharing inexpensively has been resolved with the Internet, but the old laws about sharing information took longer to adapt to technology's affordances. More important than the laws themselves are the people of power who uphold them, and have built empires upon the old way. They are the ones resisting change and progress; their fortunes depend on an antiquated system.
This is not to undermine the challenge publishers will face when required to restructure their system. Making articles freely accessible will likely take a big chunk out of their profits, and someone is going to take the financial hit for that.
No comments:
Post a Comment