Have you heard about the petition launched to the White House asking for all federally funded research to be freely accessible over the Internet? We’ve signed it and here’s why…

Today, government-funded research (that’s research paid for with your tax dollars) is often something you can have access to in published scientific journals, but for a charge.  The petition is a call to action for the current Administration to make this research open to anyone who wants to read it — study participants, other patients, researchers, healthcare providers, industry, students, or anyone at all.

Under the Administration’s new “We the People” policy, if the petition gets over 25,000 signatures within 30 days, the White House will issue a response. At the end of day two, there are already over 10,000 signatures! (Anyone can sign, even those internationally.)  You can read more about this open access movement and see what others are saying with the twitter hashtag #OAMonday.

Simply put, we believe this campaign represents the power of Openness. At PatientsLikeMe we’ve long believed in the power of open access and take steps to ensure many of our publications such as our recent epilepsy user survey, our lithium study in Nature Biotechnology, and most of our other published research is all freely available without needing to be an academic researcher. Why? Because patients like you want to read the most up-to-date scientific research and we believe you have the right to do so without impediment.

So, we’ve signed the petition.  Have you?

“In the UK, there’s a saying that e-patients have about their healthcare decisions: ‘Nothing about me, without me.’ There’s no better example of the disconnect between academic medicine and patients than a research study *about* patients that they can not read.”
- Paul Wicks, PhD, R&D Director, PatientsLikeMe (Signature #817)

“We call on patients, caregivers, family, and friends to sign this petition and send a clear message that life-saving research paid for with tax dollars is a public good and should be shared in the same spirit with which altruistic patients like you sacrificed their time, wellbeing, and sometimes even their lives.”
- Ben Heywood, President and Co-founder, PatientsLikeMe (Signature #4473)