At last the United States is moving closer to mandating Open Access for all publicly-funded research. There is no reason why we in India need to keep postponing the inevitable!
From Peter Suber's blog
More on the FRPAA Here are some helpful official links on the FRPAA: * Full text of the bill * Sen. Cornyn's floor speech introducing the bill * Sen. Cornyn's one-page summary of the bill * The FAQ on the bill * The short version of Sen. Cornyn's press release. (I've already blogged the long version.) * Sen. Lieberman's press release on the bill. And here are a couple of unofficial ones: * The press release on the bill from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. Also see the ATA page on the bill. * The press release from Public Knowledge * My article from today's issue of SOAN. When I have time, I hope to go back and blog excerpts from some of these docs. ----------------- May issue of SOAN I just mailed the May issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. This issue takes a close look at Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) just introduced in the US Senate by Senators John Cornyn and Joe Lieberman. The FRPAA mandates OA for federally funded research and imposes a firm six month deadline. The Top Stories section takes a brief look at the EC report calling for an OA mandate to publicly-funded research, the developing OA policy at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, NIH-Director Elias Zerhouni's public admission that the NIH policy might need a mandate, two recent clues to the RCUK thinking about OA, a new call for OA to biodiversity data, an "email-eprints" button for Eprints and DSpace archiving software, and the beta of Microsoft Live Academic Search. ------------------- The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA) in the US Senate today. This is giant step forward for OA, even bigger than the CURES Act that Senator Lieberman introduced in December 2005. Like CURES, FRPAA will mandate OA and limit embargoes to six months. Unlike CURES, it will not be limited to medical research and will not mandate deposit in a central repository. It will apply to all federal funding agencies above a certain size --including the NIH, NSF, NASA, EPA, and eight Cabinet-level Departments. It instructs each agency to develop its own policy, under certain guidelines laid down in the bill. Some of those agencies might choose to launch central repositories but others might choose to mandate deposit (for example) in the author's institutional repository. But all must insure OA "as soon as practicable, but not later than 6 months after publication in peer-reviewed journals". BTW, Cornyn and Lieberman introduced the bill today because the NIH public access policy took effect one year ago today. For more deails, see Sen. Cornyn's press release: In an effort to increase taxpayers' access to federally funded research, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) on Tuesday introduced the bipartisan Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006. The legislation is co-sponsored by U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). The bill requires every federal agency with an annual research budget of more than $100 million to implement a public access policy. The policy must ensure that articles generated through research funded by that agency are made available online within six months of publication. Cornyn said: "This legislation is a common-sense approach to expand the public's access to research it funds. And it will help accelerate scientific innovation and discovery." Lieberman said: "Tax payer-funded research should be accessible to tax payers. Our bill will give researchers, medical professionals and patients in Connecticut and throughout the nation access to scientific discoveries and advancements that can help bring new treatments and cures to the public." I'll also have an article about the bill later today in the May issue of SOAN. Peter Suber's Comment. This is a superb bill: informed by the arguments for OA and the shortcomings of the NIH policy. It's one more sign that legislators are not treating the NIH policy as a precedent but taking every opportunity to improve upon it: going beyond a request to a requirement, beyond long or indefinite embargoes to firm deadlines, beyond biomedicine to all disciplines, beyond publisher consent to a federal purpose license that does not accommodate publisher resistance, and at least possibly, beyond central to distributed archiving. The FRPAA adds momentum to the CURES Act and the lesser but potent pressures on the NIH to convert its request to a requirement. It will give taxpayers access to the non-classified research they fund with their taxes. It will make a very large and useful body of research even more useful than it already is by sharing it with all who can apply or build upon it. In both respects it will increase the return on the taxpayers' enormous investment in this research.