Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) on Tueday introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006, which would require that scholarship produced through federally-funded research be made available to the public for free on the Internet. Under the bill, each federal agency that spends more than $100 million per year on research (e.g., NIH, NSF, NASA) would have to create an online repository and require its grantees to place their research papers in it within six months of publication. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, "[t]he bill goes further than a policy in place at the NIH for the past year that merely requests posting in its repository, and suggests doing it within 12 months of publishing (The Chronicle, February 4, 2005)." For further details, see:
