Open Access advocates protest the FIRST Act | MobyLives

"When, in February 2013, the White House issued a directive stating that all larger federal agencies (agencies that spent over $100 million R&D annually) should make the results of any federally funded research available to the public within a year of publication, Open Access advocates cheered. This was the first commitment to an across-the-board OA policy at the federal level in the US, though the UK and the European Commission had already advanced OA policies for the results of taxpayer-funded scientific research. However, a new bill, the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology (or FIRST) Act of 2013 now threatens to reverse the progress made earlier in the year. The FIRST Act is a broad bill meant to re-establish the priorities for the National Science Foundation, since its precursor, the America COMPETES bill of 2010, is due to expire this year. It addresses many functions of the NSF, including merit review and grant distribution. But it’s Title III, Section 302 of the bill that Open Access advocates are concerned about. This section has a number of provisions that contradict, in name or in spirit, the earlier White House directive. For instance, the FIRST act requires that all agencies create policies so that federally funded articles or data are released to the public… but first they can be kept behind a paywall for 24 months, a period which can also be extended by another year if stakeholders agree. Furthermore, agencies are only required to provide links to the research, which means that publishers could retain control over content, while agencies would still be in compliance as long as their bibliographies contain a link to the material. In response, eleven organizations — among them the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) — have written a joint letter to the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, objecting to the terms of the FIRST act. Initially, they lay out their case in terms of long-range goals and the international consensus on OA for publicly funded research to date ..."