Aaron Schwarz has a peti­tion urg­ing The White House and Con­gress to unlock sci­ence research:

Three years ago this week, the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health announced that all med­ical research they fund would have to be pub­lished as “open access” — avail­able to any­one, for free, over the Inter­net. The pol­i­cy has been a huge suc­cess, but now it’s time for the rest of the gov­ern­ment to fol­low suit. 

That’s why we’re team­ing up with libraries, uni­ver­si­ties, and patient advo­ca­cy groups to demand every pub­licly-fund­ed pub­li­ca­tion be made open access. If we’re going to be spend­ing bil­lions of dol­lars on research, the least they can do is let us read it.

Click through, sign the peti­tion, and then write to your con­gress­crit­ter and to the direc­tor of NSF. The NIH exper­i­ment with an open access require­ment has opened up vital sci­en­tif­ic research to the pub­lic, and there’s no rea­son that the wealth of data gath­ered, ana­lyzed, and pub­lished using the pub­lic’s dime should not be acces­si­ble to the public.