What is the Federal Research Public Access Act and why should you care about it?

“Every year, the government funnels tens of billions of dollars toward scientific research — research that you help pay for with your taxes. These government-funded investigations give rise to an average of 65,000 peer-reviewed papers a year. Many of these papers, however, remain inaccessible to you unless you happen to subscribe to the journal in which they're published, and some of these journals are pretty expensive. Think you should be able to access this research free of charge? So do a lot of other people — in fact, legislation was just introduced that could make open-access government-funded science a reality... The legislation in question is a bill entitled the Federal Research Public Access Act or FRPAA. The upshot of the bill is that it would make papers that report on government-funded research publicly available within six months of their publication, regardless of where they were printed (be it Nature, PNAS, etc.), or the research institution that submitted them to be published...”