Omnibus Appropriations Bill Codifies White House Directive | SPARC

"Progress toward making taxpayer-funded scientific research freely accessible in a digital environment was reached today with Congressional passage of the FY 2014 Omnibus Appropriations Bill.  The bill requires federal agencies under the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education portion of the Omnibus bill with research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to articles reporting on federally funded research no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. 'This is an important step toward making federally funded scientific research available for everyone to use online at no cost,' said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).  'We are indebted to the members of Congress who champion open access issues and worked tirelessly to ensure that this language was included in the Omnibus.  Without the strong leadership of the White House, Senator Harkin, Senator Cornyn, and others, this would not have been possible.'  The additional agencies covered would ensure that more than $31 billion of the total $60 billion annual U.S. investment in taxpayer-funded research is now openly accessible. SPARC strongly supports the language in the Omnibus bill, which affirms the strong precedent set by the landmark NIH Public Access Policy, and more recently by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Directive on Public Access.  At the same time, SPARC is pressing for additional provisions to strengthen the language – many of which are contained in the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act – including requiring that articles are: Available no later than six months after publication; Available through a central repository similar to the National Institutes for Health’s (NIH) highly successful PubMed Central, a 2008 model that opened the gateway to the Human Genome Project and more recently the Brain Mapping Initiative.  These landmark programs demonstrate quite clearly how opening up access to taxpayer funded research can accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, lead to both innovative new treatments and technologies, and generate new jobs in key sectors of the economy; and Provided in formats and under terms that ensure researchers have the ability to freely apply cutting-edge analysis tools and technologies to the full collection of digital articles resulting from public funding ..."