Require free access to scientific articles based on taxpayer-funded research.
wwws.whitehouse.gov
wwws.whitehouse.gov
The most serious problem with PACER (which is the online docket system for federal courts) is that each 'page' costs the user $0.10, which precludes any meaningful search or analysis of data. I fear that if the government were to provide access to research articles and the like, they may institute similar measures to profit from the availability of this information. I realize that this is an unsubstantiated fear, but it's extremely important to consider how to implement such policies.
Remember, these publishers' very existence depends on profiting from access to journal articles. As such, they will literally fight to the death over this issue.
There is a very direct relationship between how much support this petition gets, and how willing the White House, and members of Congress, will be, in the short term, to push through open access legislation.
But it's not like I or anyone else who signs this petition is going to dust off our hands afterwards and say, "Ok done with politics."
The difference between this and other online petitions is that the White House will respond to it if it reaches 25,000 signers. Which should be in about 6.68 days, give or take.[1]
In the past these responses have oft been positive. At minimum they have been thoughtful.
Remember a political outcry, in part expressed through petitions, has worked in the recent past: it derailed SOPA.
None of the smaller political acts (petitions, letters to congressmen, debates with friends) are sufficient. But they are necessary.
[1](25,000 - current signatures) / (current signatures / days since creation)
Please do not read this the wrong way. I am not questioning what you're doing as improper. I am just curious.
Isn't most of the data in PACER just procedural (cf. substantive)? If yes, wouldn't it have only limited value in illuminating to the public "what the law is"? Would it have some other value? Maybe it might allow generation of some interesting statistics on outcomes, etc.? Maybe you are planning to "disrupt" the jury research industry?
Pardon my ignorance.
(Personally, I think you should also support freeing up access to academic research. Public access to research publications is equally as important as access to the total corpus of US Court dockets. I'm not sure anyone could learn that much just by reading court dockets. But I can assure you that by reading the scientific literature in a given field of science, one can learn a great deal.)
But to answer your question more precisely, I'm interested in identifying trends in the courts with respect to litigated issues. It'd be interesting to determine whether certain pre-trial motions have a higher propensity to be granted/denied in a particular court, before a particular judge, etc. Additionally, I'm interested in tracking cases on which attorneys and law firms typically rely when writing their briefs or other documents submitted to the court.
Publishers want to own their papers' copyrights, and have exclusive publishing rights. The fairness of this is questionable when they aren't paying for the core work done to produce the papers. They apply a lot of pressure to keep research behind paywalls, often against the will of the funders and the researchers. The idea of this petition is to give researchers and government funding agencies some legal strength if they want their work to be freely available.
I am loathe to sign political petitions b/c oftentimes its not very clear to me whether the proposed change does not have any unforeseen negative repercussions.
I can't see how this could be a bad thing. As taxpayers we are already paying for the research. Why should we have to pay a private corporation yet again (or fund the costs for our public universities to pay for them)?
"Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet"
I'm just pointing out that requiring it to be posted on the internet requires someone to host it.
Open Access journals like PLoS are usually paid by the institute who wants to publish, it costs around $2000-$3000 per paper. In a lot of cases, this cost is carried by a OA-policy or a university's grant for OA-related costs.
If this policy is successful, I guess the tax-payer will carry these costs.