Free knowledge for all!

As taxpayers in the United States, we fund a lot of projects for the government, from the life-saving to the potentially useless.  But until now, we often could not find out the fruits of our labors or, in many cases, had to pay a fee to gain access to them, despite the fact that we’d paid for the damn things in the first place.  Now, thanks to an online petition, the White House is working on changing that.  A memorandum has been issued that will force agencies doing publically funded research to post their findings for free.

The findings must be made available within 12 months of initial publication and only a certain selection of agencies will be affected - namely those that spend more than $100 million a year on research.  That does mean some rather important organizations will be subject to the new ruling, including the Dept. of Agriculture, Dept. of Defense, Dept. of Energy, National Science Foundation and that dusty old space agency known as NASA. Currently, they’re putting together a game plan of how to best implement the changes, so it may be a while before we, the public, see results.

This change is an important breakthrough in the spread and development of knowledge.  As people are able to look freely into the research done, they can learn from it and build off of it.  This leads to money saved in that outside companies looking to expand on research done by the government can avoid repeating projects that have already taken place.  Thus, research in the private arena is accelerated.  This type of change also has the added benefit of creating more transparency within the affected agencies, letting us average citizens know if the money we’re giving them for research is being put toward crap.

And the best part of the technological research revolution is that the entire thing was made possible via an online petition through We the People, a website set up last year that allows people to voice their ideas and try to get them noticed by official government big-wigs. Hopefully, this program will lead to even more ideas that are just as beneficial.

Money photo courtesy of Slick-o-bot via Wikicommons