Are you in favor of open access publication?

Then sign the petition to oppose the Research Works Act. Do it now, or the petition will fail. Spread the word.

Most of you know that Congress passed a bill in 2008 requiring that papers resulting from NIH-funded research to be deposited in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication.  This new Act reverses that bill, and furthermore forbids ANY effort by any government agency to make research more accessible illegal.  Mike Eisen has a detailed explanation here.

Number of votes required (by Feb 22!) for the petition to matter: 25000.  Number of votes at the time of writing (including mine): 1395.

Let’s kick it up a notch, folks.  Please, do not be deterred by the fact that you need a whitehouse.gov account to vote.  It takes literally 30 seconds to create one.