In practice that death star response probably only took an hour or two to write. However, figuring out federal policy on research is really tricky, and there are many stakeholders.
The fundamental problem is that the White House would like all research to be open, but every time they take any steps in that direction, they get whacked over the head in the media by the journal industry, and get called job-killers. The journal industry's argument is that any attempt to open up research will reduce their revenues, and kill jobs.
The view of most people in this debate is that the journal industry makes far too much money off research, and therefore the size of the industry should be reduced. But in this economic context being branded as a job killer is toxic.
The White House really wants to turn the debate around, and argue that open access for research is a stimulus for jobs: it will create more jobs, not fewer. To argue for that requires marshaling arguments and data from the private sector to establish that if people have access to federally-funded research, that will help them in their lives, and those benefits will outweigh the costs that the journal industry may experience.
>The White House really wants to turn the debate around, and argue that open access for research is a stimulus for jobs: it will create more jobs, not fewer. To argue for that requires marshaling arguments and data from the private sector to establish that if people have access to federally-funded research, that will help them in their lives, and those benefits will outweigh the costs that the journal industry may experience.
Do they have a team working on this, and is there any form of crowdsourcing being used to marshall this data?
It's a good question. I expect that the Office of Science and Technology is working on it to some extent, but I am not aware of how deep their efforts are.
