Early on in his new job as Chief Information Officer of the United States, Vivek Kundra said he wanted to “tap into the ingenuity of the American people to show us a better way, to show us an innovative path.” With an army of civic-minded tech geeks out there, who already have one-upped government transparency efforts with private sector projects like Recovery.org, Kundra’s strategy makes sense: Leverage all the resources you can.

A new project by a couple of researchers at Princeton University may be the next shining example of citizen ingenuity improving government. Researchers Tim Lee and Harlan Yu have developed a way to get at the holy grail of court records, turning the glacially slow, palatially expensive retrieval process into a fast, free one.

The current database for storing federal court records, called PACER, was created in 1988 to allow for easier access, but the system was designed in the era of monochrome screens and is still slow and, amazingly, unsearchable. It also requires a credit card because the judicial branch charges 8 cents a page for downloaded records.

It doesn’t seem quite fair that we should have to pay for information that is supposedly ours already. That is what Stephen Schultze, fellow at the Berkman center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, thought when he visited Princeton University last year to give a speech on public access to court records. Lee and Yu were in the audience that day and in a post-speech chat with Schultze they began to plot out a “technical intervention.”

The workaround they created, which comes as a free plug-in for the web browser Firefox, is the reverse of PACER, all the way down to its name: RECAP.

The principle behind RECAP is simple. Every time a legit user of PACER downloads a document for 8 cents, a copy of the document is added to the free internet archive. Once there it is reformatted, labeled and made searchable for the next person who needs the information.

In an interview with OhMyGov!, Yu said that since the program was launched he and his partner have been rather happy with how it has gone. “We are getting a decent number of users beginning to adopt it. We are still building but so far there have been no disasters,” he said.

Yu’s interest in open government began a couple of years ago when he and his colleagues began work on a research paper titled “Government Data in Invisible Hands,” which argues that instead of seeking to build websites to “meet each end-user need,” the government should instead focus on creating a “simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data.”

Once the data becomes available, the government should allow the public to deliver the government information. “You build a website on top of the data and then allow other partners to better the capabilities,” Yu said. As in the case of RECAP, once they had the data it was just a matter of creating a more effective (and less expensive) way to access it.

Yu believes that Obama and Kundra “understand the principles” of creating a more open government and is hopeful for the future. It was never going to be an easy thing to get our arms around the enormous amounts of data our government has stored. But at least with help of people like Yu and Lee, the task may have gotten easier.