Aaron Schwarz has a petition urging The White House and Congress to unlock science research:
Three years ago this week, the National Institutes of Health announced that all medical research they fund would have to be published as "open access" -- available to anyone, for free, over the Internet. The policy has been a huge success, but now it's time for the rest of the government to follow suit.
That's why we're teaming up with libraries, universities, and patient advocacy groups to demand every publicly-funded publication be made open access. If we're going to be spending billions of dollars on research, the least they can do is let us read it.
Click through, sign the petition, and then write to your congresscritter and to the director of NSF. The NIH experiment with an open access requirement has opened up vital scientific research to the public, and there's no reason that the wealth of data gathered, analyzed, and published using the public's dime should not be accessible to the public.
agreed, and done