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Andy Bridges W a s h i n g t o n  H o t l i n e  

Open access to research 
Open access to research is one of the most 
important issues for academic and research 
librarians. Increased access to federally 
funded research accelerates the pace of 
discovery and innovation and fosters eco­
nomic growth, and it is critical that this new 
research be readily available to physicians, 
researchers, and members of the public. 

The ALA Washington Office had hoped 
to see progress in both the House and 
the Senate related to Open Access, but, 
while House appropriations legislation 
on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 
included key report language underscoring 
Congressional oversight to actively monitor 
participation rates and overall effectiveness 
of the NIH’s Public Access Policy, the Sen­
ate deferred action on almost all spending 
bills until January 2007. 

In May 2006, U.S. Senators John Cornyn 
(R-TX) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) 
introduced the “Federal Research Public 
Access Act of 2006” (FRPAA). The bill, S. 
2695, would have required federal agen­
cies that fund more than $100 million in 
annual external research to make electronic 
manuscripts of peer-reviewed journal ar­
ticles stemming from their research publicly 
available via the Internet within six months 
of publication. 

At the ALA Annual Conference in June 
2006, ALA’s Council passed a resolution in 
support of FRPAA. As the resolution notes, 
the federal government invests $55 billion 
annually in scientific research, with the NIH 
portion accounting for one third of that, re­
sulting in more than 65,000 journal articles 
published annually. During tight budgetary 

Andy Bridges is communications specialist at ALA’s 
Washington Offi  ce, e-mail: abridges@alawash.org 

times, this legislation would help ensure 
all government departments and agencies 
that invest significant sums in research will 
achieve a greater return on their and the 
taxpayers’ investment. 

Contrary to some claims, S. 2695 was 
not a threat to journals and the peer review 
process. FRPAA contained two key provi­
sions that would have protected journals 
and the peer review process: 

• a delay of up to six months in provid­
ing access to articles via the public archive 
(versus immediate access for journal read­
ers), and 

• inclusion in the public archive of the 
author’s final manuscript rather than the 
publisher’s formatted, paginated version 
preferred for citation purposes. 

The American Center for Cures Act of 
2005, S. 2104, was a related bill whose 
aim was to speed access to biomedical 
research. Introduced in December 2005 
by Senators Lieberman and Thad Cochran 
(R-MS) to establish the American Center for 
Cures within the NIH, the bill would have 
included a provision that would help to 
make taxpayer-funded biomedical research 
available to all potential users. 

We anticipate that FRPAA will be rein­
troduced early in the 110th Congress in 
the Senate and that there will be a version 
introduced in the House of Representatives, 
as well. Please go to ALA’s Legislative Ac­
tion Center (www.capwiz.com/ala/home) 
to send a message to your Senator, ask­
ing him or her to cosponsor bills like 
this. For further information, please go to 
the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (www. 
taxpayeraccess.org/frpaa/), a coalition to 
which ALA belongs and which supports 
reforms that will make publicly funded 
research accessible to the public. 

January 2007  41 C&RL News 

www.capwiz.com/ala/home
mailto:abridges@alawash.org