President Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has been conducting ”a public consultation on Public Access Policy. The Administration is seeking public input on access to publicly-funded research results, such as those that appear in academic and scholarly journal articles. Currently, the National Institutes of Health require that research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months of publication. The Administration is seeking views as to whether this policy should be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be implemented.” “To that end, OSTP is currently conducting an interactive, online discussion that began Thursday, December 10, 2009. We will focus on three major areas of interest: Implementation (Dec. 10 to 20); Features and Technology (Dec. 21 to Dec 31); Management (Jan. 1 to Jan. 7). UPDATE: Due to a high number of requests, all three phases of the Public Access Policy Forum will remain open through Jan. 21, 2010.”

Surely NSF-funded archaeological research would be covered under this proposal, maybe even NEH-grant research. Archaeologists are bound to be impacted by this. I for one would definitely applaud our field and the humanities to be included in this mandate. Now is the time to express our opinion in this forum…