Science Committee Gets In On Open Access Legislative Dance | Pasco Phronesis

"Last Thursday Representatives James Sensenbrenner (Wisconsin) and Eddie Berniece Johnson (Texas) introduced the Public Access to Public Science Act, H.R. 3157.  They are both members of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee and the bill was referred to that committee for review.  Like every other public access bill I’ve followed for the last several years, I expect to go nowhere. The bill is mostly an update of the legislation introduced earlier in the year in both the House and Senate.  But the major difference is that the bill attempts to put in place much of the guidance in the Policy Memo released by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in February.  Unlike the Policy Memo, but like the CHORUS plan advanced by scholarly publishers, H.R. 3157 focuses primarily on research publications.  While there are references to metadata and supplementary information, the bill reads to me as focused on research articles rather than research data. Another important distinction in this new bill is that it’s narrower in scope compared to other legislation.  The standard has been to require public access policies from any agency with at least $100 million in annual research and development spending.  The new bill covers only the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Science and Technology, the National Weather Service and NASA.  I suspect this is an effort to make sure that only the science committees in each house of Congress approve the bill prior to passage.  Given the track record of public access legislation and the current legislative calendar, it feels to me like an empty gesture ..."