FRPAA's back!

On Capitol Hill, as the dust settles from the tortured passage of healthcare reform legislation, and US lawmakers ready for a coming fracas over financial reform, a bill that would make data from almost all federally funded research available to the public within six months of publication returns to the legislature's to do list. Image: Wikimedia CommonsDavid MonniauxAccording to linkurl:GenomeWeb,;http://www.genomeweb.com/house-bill-proposes-federal-open-access-policy late last week, Representa

Written byBob Grant

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Image: Wikimedia Commons
David Monniaux

According to linkurl:GenomeWeb,;http://www.genomeweb.com/house-bill-proposes-federal-open-access-policy late last week, Representative linkurl:Mike Doyle;http://doyle.house.gov/ (D-PA) revived the linkurl:Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA),;http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.5037: a previous version of which was put on hold as the Congress struggled with healthcare reform. Doyle's version of FRPAA -- like the 2009 version, sponsored by Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX) -- would mandate the online publication of manuscripts resulting from research projects funded by all large government agencies. FRPAA 2010, also like its predecessor, would require that manuscripts be made free online within six months of their publication in peer-reviewed journals. The bill's open access mandate would apply to the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Science Foundation, among other agencies. The first version of FRPAA was introduced in Congress in 2006 (later dying in committee), and was modeled, like the current bill, after an open access mandate at the National Institutes of Health, which requires that all NIH-funded research be deposited in PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. "FRPAA reflects the growing trend among funding agencies -- and college and university campuses -- to leverage their investment in the conduct of research by maximizing the dissemination of results," read a linkurl:statement;http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/issues/frpaa/frpaa_action/10-0416.shtml from the Scholarly Publishing and Research Coalition, which is urging its members to support the bill. The latest version of FRPAA comes as science funders inside and outside the government aim to increase the public's access to data from government-funded science. Last December, the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy put out a linkurl:call;http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/e9-29322.htm via the Federal Register for public comment on "enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from research funded by Federal science and technology agencies." Private funders, such as the Wellcome Trust, along with Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Kansas, have also recently instituted open access policies. The next stop for FRPAA is the linkurl:House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,;http://oversight.house.gov/ where Chairman linkurl:Edolphus "Ed" Towns;http://www.house.gov/towns/ (D-NY) and his Congressional colleagues will discuss the finer points of the bill.
**__Related stories:__***linkurl:Open access bill stalls in Congress;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/56046/
[8th October 2009]*linkurl:Nature to launch OA journal;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55994/
[23rd September 2009]*linkurl:Why Don't We Share Data?;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/55535/
[April 2009]

Meet the Author

Bob Grant

From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.

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