Petition to the German Bundestag, the National Parliament
Lars Fischer has created a petition to the Deutscher Bundestag
to support Open Access as an amendment to the pending legislation.
Signatures are now invited.
Petition
The German National Parliament (Deutscher Bundestag) should
decree that scientific publications that result from public funding,
should be openly accessible.
Those institutions that are autonomous should be called upon by
the Bundestag to set up and enforce suitable regulations
and to install suitable technical preconditions
to ensure that this is the case.
Comment
The Government supports research and development -- according to the
German Ministery for Education and Research in the amount of about
12 Billion Euro annually.
The results of this research are published, but mostly in toll-access journals.
It is not acceptable that the taxpayer should have to pay for research
results for whose creation he has already paid.
Because of the large costs and the multitude of scientific journals, research results are accessible only in a few libraries.
Most citizens are thus de facto excluded from access to scientific
results for which they have paid.
To exclude citizens from science is not only harmful, but unnecessary.
Other countries have already implemented what is being proposed here.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is requiring that all
publications that it has funded should be openly accessible within 12 months
at a central server. The general structure of the scientific
publication system is not affected by this petition.
This is an authorized translation of the originally German language text:
Petition: Wissenschaft und Forschung - Kostenloser Erwerb wissenschaftlicher Publikationen vom 20.10.2009
served by Zugang zum Wissen