It’s FASTR — Is It Bettr? « The Scholarly Kitchen

"News flash — it’s hard to get the federal government to enact laws that radically change the amount of control authors have over their work, even when that work is based on research that was undertaken at taxpayer expense. One reason it’s hard is that the legislative branch of the federal government is not exactly a lean and efficient law-making machine; in fact, some argue that it was deliberately organized in such a way as to make the creation of new laws difficult and time-consuming. But another reason is that intellectual property is a complex and deeply fraught policy issue. Not everyone wants to acknowledge this, of course. The language used by both proponents and opponents of recently proposed legislation like the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) and the Research Works Act (RWA) is crafted to convince the public that only a fool or a villain would disagree that the initiative in question is clearly and simply the [worst/best] idea ever, one that will [create/solve] fundamental problems for scholarship and will usher in [The Great Day/Armageddon] for the taxpaying public and the scholarly community. For better or worse, both FRPAA and RWA have so far failed to make it past the rocky shoals of congressional approval. FASTR Now comes another public-access bill, and another opportunity for those on both sides of the divide to call for all intelligent people of good will to do the clearly moral thing and [oppose/support] it. The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR, which, whatever the bill’s merits, you have to admit is a brilliant acronym) was introduced in both houses of Congress on February 14 by a bipartisan team of sponsors. FASTR would require federal agencies that fund $100 million or more of extramural research each year to ensure that funded authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts are made publicly available within six months of publication. Furthermore, the articles are to be made available to the public 'in formats and under terms that enable productive reuse, including computational analysis by state-of-the-art technologies.' If FASTR simply called for final manuscripts to be made promptly available for reading and download by the taxpaying public, the bill would be less controversial. There would certainly be disagreement, and even if the bill were adopted, there would surely be negotiation around the acceptable length of embargo — but such disagreement and negotiation are normal. What makes FASTR more difficult is its provision that articles be made available for 'productive reuse, including computational analysis by state-of-the-art technologies' — in other words, text-mining and other (unnamed and as yet undeveloped) methods of large-scale automated text processing..."