S.2695

From Eureka

S.2695 is a bill under consideration by the U.S. Senate that would mandate open access to federally funded research. This bill states that within 1 year of its passage, each federal agency with a budget of $100,000,000 or more must require recipients of federal funds to place the results of their federally funded research online for free public access, no later than 6 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

This bill was introduced by Senator John Cornyn of Texas in 2006, one year after a similar measure was passed, but voluntary and limited to the National Institutes of Health. 2.2695 failed to come up for a vote that in 2006, but will apparently be reintroduced.

According to the Washington Post^[1]

The legislation, which would demand that most recipients of federal grants make their findings available free on the Web within six months after they are published in a peer-reviewed journal, represents a rebuke to scientific publishers, who have asserted that free access to their contents would undercut their paid subscription base.

It also signifies that some members of Congress have lost patience with a voluntary plan initiated a year ago by the National Institutes of Health. That plan encouraged but did not require recipients of NIH grants to make their findings public within a year after publication. In the first six months of that program, only about 4 percent of eligible researchers bothered to do so [...].

The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006, co-sponsored by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), goes considerably further than the NIH program. In addition to requiring public access within six months, not 12, it would apply to research funded by all 11 federal agencies that provide at least $100 million in outside funding per year — a category that includes the departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Homeland Security as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and the National Science Foundation.

The American Association of Publishers has formed a group called PRISM to lobby against S.2695 and similar legislation, following a stategy developed by Eric Dezenhall. According to the Washington Post^[1]:

Patricia S. Schroeder, president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, promised a fight. "It is frustrating that we can't seem to get across to people how expensive it is to do the peer review, edit these articles and put them into a form everyone can understand," Schroeder said.

In the age of the Internet, everyone wants everything free, Schroeder said. "But we can't figure out what exactly the business model would be. And if you just got the raw research, you wouldn't have a clue" how to use it, she said.

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