On March 18, 2015, members of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate introduced the bipartisan Fair Access to Science & Technology Research (FASTR) Act of 2015 (S.779, H.R. number to come). FASTR, if passed, would codify the provisions to enhance public access to federally funded journal literature that were included in the February 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum on public access to research. Provisions in the legislation would require that federal agencies with research budgets of $100 million or more make peer-reviewed final manuscripts publicly available six months following publication. In addition, the FASTR bill calls for the long-term preservation of and access to these manuscripts. The legislation seeks to accelerate scientific discovery and fuel innovation by making articles reporting on publicly funded scientific research freely accessible online.
The FASTR bill introduced on March 18 is the same as the FASTR legislation considered in the previous session of Congress. ARL has strongly supported FASTR in the past and will continue to promote the legislation going forward.
