"Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results"

I got the following email from the Public Library of Science and signed their petition. If you agree, please consider signing it too.

Dear PLoS Letter Signers,

We are writing to you because you signed the PLoS open letter some years ago urging scientific publishers to allow the research reports that have appeared in their journals to be distributed freely by independent, online public libraries of science. As you supported that initiative we are now asking you to support a further one that will encourage the European Commission to take action that will secure vastly increased access to publicly-funded science output. Professor Harold Varmus, Nobel laureate and co-originator of the PLoS open letter, has already put his name to the petition and we encourage you to follow his lead.

In the wake of the publication of the report from the “EU Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe” a consortium of organisations working in the scholarly communication arena is sponsoring a petition to the European Commission to demonstrate support for Open Access and for the recommendations in the report. Signatures may be added on behalf of individuals or institutions.

Please register your support for Open Access in this way. To sign the petition, please go to http://www.ec-petition.eu/

The sponsoring organisations are JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark).

Warm regards,

Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing