For immediate release:
January 19, 2009
For more information, contact:
Prudence Adler
Association of Research Libraries
202-296-2296
prue@arl.org
Washington DC-- On January 15, 2010, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) filed a letter responding to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking public comment on “enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from research funded by federal science and technology agencies.” The RFI was released as a part of the Administration’s Open Government Directive.
The letter is available on the ARL Web site at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/ostp-15jan2010.pdf.
It is very important that the interests of the research library community be included in these deliberations concerning public access to federally funded research. ARL supports enhanced access to federally funded research resources because such policies are integrally tied to and support the mission of higher education and scholarship. ARL believes that extending public access policies to federally funded research to other science and technology agencies will be a central component of President Obama’s Transparency and Open Government initiative.
Through an Executive Order and working with congressional leaders on a legislative approach, the Obama Administration should mandate that all grantees who receive federal funds from an agency be required to deposit either the final, published version of a peer-reviewed journal article or the final electronic manuscript of such an article in a publicly available digital repository. The role of the digital archive would be to provide long-term curation and access to this literature and to be interoperable with other digital archives and institutions. There should be no restrictions placed on use of this literature or on who is able to use these federally funded information resources, and the embargo period, if there is one, should be as short as possible.
Responses are invited via the Public Access Policy Forum at http://www.whitehouse.gov/open, or they may be submitted via electronic mail. Please see http://www.ostp.gov/galleries/default-file/RFI%20Final%20for%20FR.pdf for more information. Responses are due January 21, 2010.
For more information on the Open Government Directive, please visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/documents/open-government-directive.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries in North America. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/.