Throughout the evolution sharing knowledge has been a critical condition for the survival of mankind. May be now more than ever before. And we have the means to do it. Internet, WWW, etc. are there. So, let's make the step from "Yes, we can" to "Yes, we will".

The Brazilian Institute of Scientific and Technological Information (IBICT) supports the recommendation as it does for open access to scientific information in brazilian digital repositories and journals.

For the biggest bang for the buck in research, any publicly supported research outside the military should have its results placed in a suitable institutional repository and this should be mandated by the funding agency and/or the researchers' institutions. It is also, as Brazilians have understood - see the SciELO project - the best way to increase the impact of researchers.

As someone who works in a medical library and sees daily how much it costs taxpayer-funded institutions such as hospitals and universities to obtain articles about the results of studies funded with taxpayer dollars, I am amazed that we even have to fight for the open access policies of the NIH. That data belongs to the taxpayers. Thank you for ensuring that justice and wisdom prevail.

I believe our next major breakthrough in productivity will be powered by extending Internet technologies to confidential information, for example in health care. For this innovation to occur, an environment of trust must exist and therefore personal privacy must be assured. But another part of an environment of trust is that the results of research be open as this will accelerate needed advances.

I have two kids with a genetic disease. More than 6000 genetic diseases burden more than 25 million Americans. We have evidence that public banking of the genome and ‘the commons’ of information are thriving, let's do the same for peer reviewed information. We have plenty of scientific and economic challenges, we don't need the artificial barrier of gated access. Let's get the job done now!

The new CTO of the Obama administration should make it a priority to require open access <http://www.plos.org/oa/definition.html> to peer-reviewed literature.

European countries have embraced OA, the US still lags. Domestic issues aside, what effect does our inflexible reliance upon proprietary distribution have on our standing in the international community of research, teaching, and learning? If we fail to address OA, we may not only find ourselves inextricably growing a domestic underclass but further alienating ourselves in the global community.

This recommendation is reasonable, necessary, fair and feasible. Enacting it as government-wide policy should be a priority for the new administration.

100%

I Welcome Open Access all the time, because Knowledge should be always shared to reach the heights in scientific development and society development

*Public* is somehow becoming an outmoded concept in Italy at the moment. Please keep up the good work!

Please promote science! There is just one way. Knowledge must be free to all!

This is just a great orientation. This should probably be integrated into a global scientific information policy providing a roadmap for the management of scientific digital asset (research data, publications) and identify what kind of infrastructures should be thus supported (repositories).

This would be a great boon not just to the US but also the broader world, particularly the developing world.

A policy that unlocks knowledge generated through public funds into the public domain will only add to the quality of content on the Internet. One cannot possibly imagin all the richness that will come out of the use of this corpus of knowledge in a Web 2.0 world. We cannot afford not to do it!

Short of a turnaround in our economic direction and permanent peace, it seems to me that this issue is so very important to us now, and , to the generations behind us. You have my vote!
ed dalterio

ImreSimon... is that not part of the NIH policy? If so (and I thought so), then it's already included.

The mandate should be amended to guarantee that authors retain enough of their copyrights to allow the distribution of the peer-reviewed research paper on a non-commercial basis, independently of the publisher, possibly after a short embargo period. Such an extension of the mandate would be instrumental to conceive scientific knowledge as a commons pool resource.

Publicly-funded research is the only way research should be done to prevent bias and corruption of the scientific method which has occured when others have performed or sponsored research for their own monetary benefit.