Every year the American people send millions of their dollars to our government so we can do research on everything from heart disease to space travel. In the past publicly funded research was printed by private publishers in scientific journals and if you wanted to read it you either had to go to the library that actually had those journals or pay the publisher for a subscription or a single user fee. The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) (S. 1373) was reintroduced on Saturday by Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX) to finally end all of that.

The original bill was introduced in 2006 and would “require every federal department and agency with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more to make their research available to the public within six months of publication,” according to Andrew Albanese of Publishers Weekly. It was introduced partially because in May 2005 the National Institutes of Health launched a program called the Public Access Plan that was meant to allow the American people to freely read the scientific research their tax dollars supported. The NIH’s program “has been successful so far,” said Peter Suber<!--[endif]--> of Open Access News.

Because of the success experienced by NIH the FRPAA bill that went nowhere in 2006 is being brought back to the Senate floor for another go around. The bill has its opponents and that includes a strong and very annoyed group of publishing lobbyists. They are not prepared to get off the government research gravy train just yet.

To that end they have recruited Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) to introduce a bill (HR 801<!--[endif]-->) that prohibits the federal government from requiring copyright transfer in connection with receiving federal funding. It was initially written to counteract the effects of the NIH’s Public Access Plan and is called the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act. The use of the word “fair” in the bill is interesting, as it seems to be only fair to the folks in the publishing world.

But the FRPAA has a great deal of impetus behind it this time not the least of which is President Obama’s own call for more open government. The bill has supporters ranging from Higher Education leaders to the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. “Ready access to published research will advance the frontiers of knowledge more rapidly, bringing the fruits of federal expenditure for research to citizens more quickly,” said David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

You may not have been sitting around wondering why you don’t have access to the research on Manure and Byproduct Utilization at the Department of Agriculture but you can rest assured that somebody was. It seems that this bill, though seemingly low in profile, will do as much to open up government as anything else we’ve done to date. If just one taxpayer gets the information they need and deserve then we can say we’ve made progress.