Just as I’m putting together slides for my open access presentation at WebSearch University comes news of legislation just introduced in the Senate by John Cornyn (Republican from Texas) and Joseph Lieberman (Democrat from Connecticut) called the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006. The FAQ is here. It would require recipients of federal grants to make their research accessible via the Web within 6 months of publication. All the major library associations, as part of the coalition of AALL, ALA, ARL, ACRL, MLA, and SLA, support the bill. In fact, they “applaud legislation that improves public access to federal scientific research.” I have a press release that SLA e-mailed to me, but I don’t yet see it on their Web site . It may show up later today or tomorrow. Another sentence from the press release, “Enhanced public access to publicly funded research spurs innovation and competition by accelerating research, sharing knowledge, improving treatment of diseases, and supports the educational enterprise.”
There’s an excellent (what else would you expect?) piece by Peter Suber at the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.