{"id":10770,"date":"2022-08-28T13:52:32","date_gmt":"2022-08-28T17:52:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10770"},"modified":"2022-08-28T13:52:32","modified_gmt":"2022-08-28T17:52:32","slug":"new-federal-open-access-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10770","title":{"rendered":"New Federal Open Access Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finally some sense from the US government. According to this White House news release<\/a>, research funded by the government must be available to the public without cost or delay. In particular, the current policy of a one year embargo on published research will be discontinued. Of course, being the government, the new policy will not be fully in force until 2026.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve written many times, it\u2019s immoral to ask the American public to pay for research and then lock up the results of that research behind a paywall. Worse, subscriptions to a single journal can run into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year.<\/p>\n

The \u201cnormal\u201d citizen will have no interest in access to these journals of course but there are plenty of people with the ability and interest to read and use the research but who don\u2019t have access to a university library or other source of the journals. And, of course, researchers from third world countries who are fully capable of using and extending the research have no access at all,<\/p>\n

The completely normalized, but illegal, solution is sites like Sci-Hub<\/a> that curate the papers and make them available for free. This infuriates the publishers whose copyrights are being violated but most of the scientific community\u2014fed up with the publishers\u2019 greed and refusal to remedy the situation\u2014seem fine with Sci-Hub and other pirate sites.<\/p>\n

Added before publication<\/b><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a couple more articles on the change. One from Science<\/a> and the other from Ars Technica<\/a>. These articles looks briefly at some of the consequences of the new rule.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finally some sense from the US government. According to this White House news release, research funded by the government must be available to the public without cost or delay. In particular, the current policy of a one year embargo on … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[184],"class_list":["post-10770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-open-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10770"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10771,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10770\/revisions\/10771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}