FASTR Approved by Senate Committee

"On July 29 the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) unanimously passed S. 779, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act by voice vote. The bill, which calls for public access to taxpayer-funded research, was marked up to bring it into line with the existing White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) policy memorandum and current National institutes of Health (NIH) policy, and will now move to the full Senate for consideration. FASTR was first introduced in February 2013 in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The bill called on federal agencies with extramural research budgets—to be used by outside institutions—of more than $100 million to make peer-reviewed articles based on the results of that research freely available on the Internet within six months of publication. A week after its introduction, the OSTP instituted its nearly identical mandate for federal funding agencies, although the OSTP directive stipulated a maximum 12-month embargo on papers, rather than FASTR’s six months, and asked that agencies deposit manuscripts in their own archives. While many of the directive’s advocates, including the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), believed that there was still a need to pass the FASTR legislation into law, FASTR died in Congress. The act was reintroduced in March 2015 by a bipartisan coalition of Senate and House members including co-sponsors Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), as well as Representatives Mike Doyle (D-PA-14), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA-19), and Kevin Yoder (R-KS-3) ..."