The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research bill has been introduced in the House and the Senate.
Here's an excerpt from Peter Suber's analysis how the bill compares to the Federal Research Public Access Act :
Here's how FASTR differs from FRPAA:
- FASTR contains a provision on coordinating agency policies (4.a 2): "To the extent practicable, Federal agencies required to develop a policy…shall follow common procedures for the collection and depositing of research papers." This will reduce the burden on universities that need to comply with procedures at all the covered agencies, and should have no detrimental effect on OA. Indeed, it should improve compliance with agency OA policies.
- FASTR contains three provisions calling for libre OA or open licensing:
- FASTR includes a new "finding" in its preamble (2.3): "the United States has a substantial interest in maximizing the impact and utility of the research it funds by enabling a wide range of reuses of the peer-reviewed literature that reports the results of such research, including by enabling computational analysis by state-of-the-art technologies."
- FASTR includes a formatting and licensing provision (4.b.5): the versions deposited in repositories and made OA shall be distributed "in formats and under terms that enable productive reuse, including computational analysis by state-of-the-art technologies."
- FASTR requires that the annual report from each covered agency include a statement from the agency on "whether the terms of use applicable to such research papers are effective in enabling productive reuse and computational analysis by state-of-the-art technologies" (4.f.2.B.i) and the results of the agency's "examination of whether such research papers should include a royalty-free copyright license that is available to the public and that permits the reuse of those research papers, on the condition that attribution is given to the author or authors of the research and any others designated by the copyright owner" (4.f.2.B.ii).
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a call to action to support the bill.
| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography (paperback, PDF file, and XHTML website; over 1,100 entries) | Digital Scholarship |
