Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act | Scholars Cooperative - Wayne State University Blogs

"From SPARC, excerpts from a letter of support for the 'Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act' in front of Congress now, 'Every year, the federal government funds over sixty billion dollars in basic and applied research…..This research results in a significant number of articles being published each year – approximately 90,000 papers are published annually as result of NIH funding alone.” “FASTR would require those agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from such funding no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The bill gives individual agencies flexibility in choosing the location of the digital repository to house this content, as long as the repositories meet conditions for public accessibility and productive reuse of digital articles, and have provisions for interoperability and long-term archiving.' There is a lot to unpack here from such a minimal introduction, but a couple interesting and central themes behind the FASTR bill emerge ..."