Fourth-time lucky for US open access bill? : Nature News Blog

"The bill, with the snappy acronym FASTR (‘Fair Access to Science and Technology Research’) would mandate research agencies to give the public access to papers no later than six months after their publication. Currently the US National Institutes of Health requires its research to be publicly accessible after 12 months, so the bill would halve that time-frame, and by extending the policy to other agencies, approximately double the number of papers publicly available each year. Its Senate version was introduced by John Cornyn (R-TX), and Ron Wyden (D-OR); the House version [pdf] by Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Kevin Yoder (R-KS). A previous similar bill, known as the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), has been introduced into Congress three times before – in May 2006, April 2009 and February 2012 – but never got to the voting stage. FASTR is slightly different, mainly because of an added focus that papers should be made open not just to read, but also to re-use (such as by text-mining). Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has set up a website with notes on the new bill and its differences. Although FRPAA went nowhere, open-access advocates hope that FASTR will be fourth-time lucky. It’s being introduced in a different political climate, with agencies around the world pushing more strongly for public access than ever before. Update: The Association of American Publishers, whose members include Elsevier and other science publishers,  has today come out strongly against FASTR, calling it ‘unnecessary and a waste of federal resources’.  On a separate but parallel track, the White House is widely rumoured to be making its thoughts on open access public soon, although that rumour has been floating around since well before last year’s election. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has already twice asked for public views on the subject in December 2009 and again in November 2011 (the latter request coming because it had been charged with improving public access to research under a reauthorization of the America COMPETES ACT in December 2010)... One thing the FASTR bill does suggest is that sympathy in the United States appears to lie with the ‘green’ version of open access, whereby researchers make papers publicly available in repositories, often with a delay after publication, but where publishers recoup their costs by continuing to charge subscriptions to libraries..."