A Sweet Triumph for Open Access

The White House, never eager to puts its neck out too far, clearly saw the long-term trendlines and the growing popularity of OA norms.  The suicide of Internet activist Aaron Swartz – who was aggressively prosecuted for trying to make millions of JSTOR research articles openly available – surely helped dramatize the public mood about OA even further.  Finally, an OA petition at the White House website garnered 65,000 signatures, far more than the 25,000 needed to trigger an official White House response (the bar for triggered a White House response has since been raised to 100,000 signatures).

The National Institute for Health pioneered OA requirements in 2008, which predictably spurred wider adoption of OA norms in many fields of medical research.  It’s really an unassailable policy.  As the New York Times opined in an editorial, “We Paid for the Research.  So Let’s See It.”  Of course, major commercial publishers of scientific research have stoutly resisted OA requirements with all sorts of half-baked rationales – and their clout tended to have more sway over the U.S. Congress than simple fairness.

Which reminds me of Peter Suber’s recent blog post reminding us that OA standards are not yet a statutory requirement; the White House directive is only an executive branch requirement.  So a number of people recently introduced bipartisanly supported legislation in Congress – FASTR, or Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act – which would mandate OA publication of federal research for eleven federal agencies.

Beyond making OA statutory, there is the larger issue of setting some higher, more ambitious goals for the OA movement.  Consider this interesting essay by British OA advocate Peter Murray-Rust, who wonders about the adequacy of "openness" in a world of grossly unequal resources.  Murray-Rust aspires for OA to reach out beyond the academy, to normal citizens; to find ways to reduce journal prices more generally; to assure the re-use of scholarly output (which is not necessarily possible with OA works unless the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses are used); and to change the practices of science so that it is not dependent upon publishers to validate what’s worthy of attention.

All in all, however, the White House directive is a milestone for the OA movement that should be seen as a serious, long-awaited achievement.  Time to celebrate!