...Obama announced his science platform earlier this month in response to questions posed by ScienceDebate2008, a nonpartisan political education group. When asked by Wired Science, the campaign identified five people who had helped draft Obama's statement: Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health; Gilbert Ommen, a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; Peter Agre, a Nobel laureate and civil rights advocate; NASA researcher Donald Lamb; and Stanford University plant biologist Sharon Long.
Republican candidate John McCain responded to the ScienceDebate2008 questions on Monday, but his campaign ignored multiple requests for the identity of its science advisors....
Harold Varmus: President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He won a Nobel Prize in 1989 for breakthroughs in cancer genetics. Under Clinton, he directed the National Institutes of Health....A champion of open-access research, Varmus co-founded the Public Library of Science. He chairs the scientific board of Grand Challenges in Global Health, launched by the Gates Foundation and NIH to improve health in the developing world. Varmus was an advisor to the now-defunct Campaign to Defend the Constitution, launched to combat the political influence of the religious right. His political contributions are here....
Comments. Obama hasn't yet directly endorsed OA, but this comes very close and may lead to a direct endorsement.
In fact, both candidates have already shown that they lean more toward OA than against.
In June 2006, John McCain called for federal policies "to encourage open exchange of data and results of research conducted by agency scientists" (which is less about OA than preventing Bush-style censorship of government scientists), and in December 2007, he called for OA to CRS reports.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/17/2008 11:29:00 PM.
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.
