I saw this post via twitter and thought people involved in ScienceOnlineVancouver might like to see do something similar. ^Catherine (also @genegeek)

Dear Mom, Please Sign The Petition. #OAMonday

Inspired by Stuart Shieber’s open letter to his family and friends asking them to sign the access2research petition, here is the email I just sent to mine.  Please use bits if you’d like.  I dislike spamming people, but y’know sometimes people who love you want to help you, and it is your job to show them how.

Furthermore, this isn’t just a researcher issue.  It is an everyone issue.  #ResearchAccessFTW

Hi family and friends,

I’m emailing to ask you to help with my research. It’ll take about 5 minutes.

Specifically, I’m asking you to sign a petition that states that research paid for by US taxpayer dollars should be available for free to US taxpayers (and others!) on the internet. It’ll help you, and it’ll help my research.

Short version: sign petition here: http://access2research.org/Petition
Cool version: watch this video: http://vimeo.com/42549003
Long version:

Right now a research article costs more than a book! About $30. Only people with university affiliations have broad access… and then only to the journals their libraries subscribe to. The journals are extraordinarily (and unnecessarily) expensive. High school teachers, enthusiastic 16 year olds, journalists, government officials, scientists in industry, proud scientist-parents-and-siblings… all of them pay for research but can’t read it without paying again.

This impacts you because you can’t easily read the research you pay for. It impacts me because there is a lot I can’t read… and even more that my computer can’t read because of restrictive subscription terms (see recent press coverage of my struggles here and here). This wastes time and results in worse science.

The biggest medical funder in the US, the NIH, started hosting drafts of research articles for free a few years ago, as a condition of its research funding. This has been a huge win, with no meaningful financial downsides to anyone. The goal is to expand this program to all US government funders.

You can help: sign this petition, ideally in the next few days. If we get 25k signatures in the next month the issue will be placed in Obama’s office for integration into policy. !!!. This is HUGE.

(You can sign whether US or Canadian citizen! Canadians would get access to the US research too… and it would help convince the Canadian government to adopt similar rules. You will have to create an account with whitehouse.gov to sign.)

Thanks very much for reading this, and please spread the word. Feel free to write to me whenever you have causes that keep *you* up at night :)