5: Passage of legislation requiring “open access” publishing for all research reports resulting from work funded by the National Institutes of Health.
After years of heated debate inside and outside of Congress, the NIH implemented the nation’s first open access law in April. As a result, all 80,000 or so research papers published each year that describe the results of NIH-funded studies must now be made available on a free, publicly accessible database within 12 months after publication in a journal. No longer will people who want to read the results of NIH research —paid for with their tax dollars— have to subscribe to expensive scientific journals or pay page charges to the publishers, as has long been the case. The advance will also make it easier for scientists to access each other’s work and for researchers to combine data sets from multiple published reports to perform meta-analyses —a cost-saving means of leveraging scientific data that has been difficult to implement until now....
1: The appointment of a new team of scientific advisers for the next administration
What can we say? President-elect Barack Obama has created nothing less than a dream team when it comes to putting people with real scientific expertise in all the key slots that will need to make evidence-based decisions over the next four years —including his decision, released over the weekend, to post Nobel-prize-winning cancer researcher Harold Varmus and genomics whiz kid Eric Lander to the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology.
The actual evidence that all these Obama-appointed scientists are going to hew to, of course, is largely dispiriting. Climate change, energy needs, food insecurity, and economic chaos —all are threatening global peace and undermining the human quest for justice. But progress is not possible without a square look at the facts. I for one am ready to swallow hard, face the unalloyed truth, and support the plans that have the best hope of getting this listing ship of state on an even keel again.
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.
