What Students Can Do To Support OA

Peter Suber's OA News reports that Emory University student Brian Pitts has blogged a student resolution (modelled on the University of Florida student resolution) in support of the Federal research Public Access Act (FRPAA) Green OA mandate. Below is a letter to Brian and other students suggesting that they can help OA even more by also lobbying in support of a Green OA Mandate at their own university, rather than just waiting for the passage of the FRPAA mandate:

Dear Brian:

Student support for FRPAA is a terrific idea. Could I make a few suggestions?

(1) The FRPAA is basically a Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate. That means it requires researchers funded by the agencies to make their articles OA by depositing them in their Institutional Repository (IR). (Here are some of the IRs of Georgia and Florida universities.)

(2) Charity (and OA!) begins at home.

(3) 132 university provosts have signed in support of FRPAA (not Emory or U. Fla. yet!)

(4) Universities need not wait for FRPAA to be adopted in order to adopt a Green OA mandate of their own.

(5) Students could be even more effective if they lobbied their own universities not only to (i) support FRPAA but to (ii) mandate Green OA for their own university.

(6) Your case for OA will be the strongest if you cite all the reasons OA is so important: (i) peer to peer access, so researchers can use, apply, and build upon one another's research findings, for the benefit of the tax-payers who funded the research; (ii) student access, so the next generation of researchers and users can be trained on current research findings; (iii) developing world access, so poorer countries can access and build on US research findings; (iv) public access, so tax-payers can access the research findings they have paid for.

("Green OA", by the way, means making research freely accessible by depositing it in an OA repository; "Gold OA" means publishing it in an OA journal. Green OA needs to come before Gold OA, and that is what the FRPAA Green OA mandate is for.)

Best wishes,

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum