President Obama has nominated Kathleen Sebelius to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). Sebelius is the Democratic governor of Kansas.
Comment. What's the OA connection? As far as I can tell, Sebelius has no public track record for or against OA to research, although she does have a good record on open government and OA to PSI. The important OA connection is that HHS is the home of the NIH. We haven't had an NIH Director since Elias Zerhouni stepped down last October, and we haven't had a Secretary of HHS since the regime change in January 2009. Obama initially nominated Tom Daschle to be Secretary of HHS, but Dashle withdrew when the public learned that he failed to pay $140,000 in personal income taxes until after his nomination. We have a leadership vacuum at NIH and HHS, and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) is taking advantage of it by pushing early and hard for his Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (a.k.a. the Conyers bill, HR 801). The Secretary of HHS and Director of NIH both require Senate confirmation, and in practice the HHS position must be filled before the NIH position. So this is the first of a series of steps needed to restore leadership to the department (HHS) and agency (NIH) responsible for the country's strongest funder OA policy, at a time when the policy is under aggressive attack from the publishing lobby. Sebelius is a good person and her nomination is a good development. Friends of OA have been working hard to protect the NIH policy and oppose the Conyers bill, but there's no doubt that the Daschle fiasco gave the publishers a month-long advantage in this session of Congress. That advantage will soon end.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/28/2009 10:39:00 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.
