The number of documents that have been listed as "secret" jumped from 9 million in 2001 to 16 million in 2004. Moreover, this same administration has granted the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the Health and Human Services Department the power to classify any of their documents as "secret." (I guess the purpose was to keep such vital information from falling into the hands of terrorists who might try, for example, to blow up a silo or two in the Midwest.)
In that same period, thousands of unclassified documents have been purged from government Web sites and the National Archives. In 2001, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft instructed federal agencies to "resist" Freedom of Information Act requests whenever they could find legal grounds to do so.
If information is the oxygen of democracy (the system President Bush is trying to install in Iraq), the Bush administration seems to be doing everything in its power to cut off the supply here in the good old USA.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/22/2006 03:29:00 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.
