Comment. Here's a bit of what I said when President Obama nominated her in February:
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....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)....[I]n practice the HHS position must be filled before the NIH position....[T]here's no doubt that the Daschle fiasco [which delayed the Sebelius nomination] gave the publishers a month-long advantage in this session of Congress. That advantage [is coming to an end].
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/28/2009 10:43:00 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.
