Unless you are a student or a faculty member at a large University, you may not have easy access to the plethora of academic articles and journals available. The good news is that the federal government is looking to change that.

The White House on Friday said that after a “We the People” petition with over 65,000 signatures, the Obama administration would be “committed to ensuring that the results of federally-funded scientific research are made available to and useful for the public, industry, and the scientific community.” And we couldn’t agree more.

Because the federal government’s funding is responsible for so much of the research produced in this country, releasing the information for the public to view is, if anything else, a measure of accountability.

By allowing this research to be publicly available for free, those not affiliated with large research universities — or any research institution — will have an easier time accessing information. Beyond that, many smaller universities may not be able to afford the high costs to subscribe to the large digital libraries, like JSTOR or EBSCO, for example.

Because of the lack of subscriptions, JSTOR denies over 100 million people access to the content that it stores.

While these kinds of articles may become more accessible as a result of action from the Obama administration, that doesn’t change the complex language used in them. Because the researchers write their articles for other academics in their field, they are littered with jargon that can be unintelligible to the general citizen looking to this research for information.

For the students who have to use the articles contained in these journals for even the most basic of research papers, the language can be difficult to understand and accurately report in a paper.

Often the information in these journals quickly affects the policy of the day, it becomes even more crucial that a voting public have access to this kind of information.

When you consider that most if not all research is pursued simply to advance human knowledge without monetary gain, releasing research articles to the general public for free begins to seem all the more sensible. The way research works in this country, journals, especially the big ones, are the ones making money. Although these journals set the standard for acceptable research with good research designs and conclusions to match, they do so at a high price for those who want to read them.

At that, most articles are peer-reviewed, meaning that the articles published in these journals get the bulk of their editing and revisions from fellow researchers, who ensure the quality of the research.

But if money is still a concern, journals can still profit from disseminating the research: The articles need only be released for free within a year of publication.

Despite the difficulty for many to understand the research published though, the move toward a more accountable spending of tax dollars can only be commended, especially if it allows more people to read what is developed in this country’s research institutions.