Please contact your Senators this week, and ask them to support an OA mandate at the NIH. Here are some links to help:
The alert from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. This includes some useful background and talking points. (Also see my blog post on it with comments.)
The alert from the American Library Association. This includes a web form to make it easier to get your message to your Senators. You can compose your own message or modify and personalize the message put together by Charles Bailey. (Also see my blog post and comments.)
Either of these should suffice. Pick one, compose your message, and get it off. If you don't use the ALA web form, then get your Senators' contact info from CongressMerge. But if you'd like more help in writing your message, here are some more sources:
The open letter from 26 US Nobel laureates in science (July 8, 2007) asking Congress to strengthen the NIH policy from a request to a requirement.
And two of my newsletter articles: one on the bill now before Congress to strengthen the NIH policy (August 2007) and the other a full-length rebuttal to the publishing lobby's claim that an OA mandate would undermine peer review (September 2007).
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
