Begin forwarded message:
[Forwarding from Harvard University. --Peter Suber.]
A coalition of President, Provosts, and research Vice Presidents of 27 of the
nation’s leading research universities and colleges has issued an open letter
calling for greatly increased public access to the results of research funded by
major federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, National
Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention.
The letter has been issued in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act
(FRPAA), which is currently working its way through Congress. The letter notes
that FRPAA “builds upon the success of the first U.S. policy for public access
to publicly funded research – implemented in 2008 through the National
Institutes of Health – and mirrors the intent of campus-based policies for
research access that are being adopted by a growing number of public and private
institutions across the nation.
“We believe that this legislation represents a watershed and provides an
opportunity for the entire U.S. higher education and research community to draw
upon their traditional partnerships and collaboratively realize the
unquestionably good intentions of the Bill’s framers – broadening access to
publicly funded research in order to accelerate the advancement of knowledge and
maximize the related public good,” the letter says.
The signers of the letter are representatives of, among other institutions,
Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton, Cornell, Duke, Indiana Universities, two campuses
of the University of Texas, the University of California system and two of its
individual campuses, Stanford University, Tulane University, and Rutgers, the
State University of New Jersey.
The letter has been posted on the website of Steven E. Hyman, Harvard Provost
and a signer, at
http://www.provost.harvard.edu/reports/FRPAA_Open_Letter.pdf
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Received on Tue Apr 27 2010 - 11:49:29 BST