The Chief Academic and Research Officers of 18 research universities in the U.S., representing public and private institutions across 10 states, have declared their support for the Federal Research Public Access Act (S. 1373) in a letter issued today by the Greater Western Library Alliance. The letter is the first issued by chief academic and research officers in partnership, jointly recognizing the value of greater accessibility and utility afforded by legislation for public access to federally funded research.

The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), introduced in June by Senators Lieberman (I-CT) and Cornyn (R-TX), is a bi-partisan measure to ensure online public access to the published results of research funded through eleven U.S. agencies. The bill would require that journal articles stemming from publicly funded research be made available in an online repository no later than six months after publication.

The letter reads, in part:
Timely, barrier-free access to the results of federally funded research supports the core mission of our academic institutions and is essential to fully utilize our collective investment in science. FRPAA will help us maximize this investment by increasing the sharing research results, advancing the pace of discovery, and applying this knowledge for the benefit of our communities.  The FRPAA bill also expands on the success of the public access policy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the first U.S. agency to require public access to taxpayer-funded research.  More than 450,000 unique users access material from the NIH repository each day.  Under S.1373, we envision researchers and students working in fields of equal importance — from climate change to renewable energy — having the same access to federally funded research to advance their critical work.
The full text of the letter is available at http://www.gwla.org.

“This legislation will deliver tremendous value to our institutions individually as well as to the academy as a whole,” said David W. Pershing, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Utah. “Ensuring access to the latest research funded by the U.S. government will help ensure that U.S. higher-educational institutions remain competitive on the world stage.”

“Unlocking the results of federally funded research in this way by requiring open and online access will enable researchers not only to reach the material, but use it in new and innovative ways,” added Gary K. Ostrander, Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education, University of Hawaii at Manoa. “This bill will make it possible to truly conduct science in the digital age and advance discovery in the 21st century.”

The institutions represented are members of the Greater Western Library Alliance, a coalition of research libraries that collaborates on matters related to scholarly communication, electronic resources, cooperative collection development, digital libraries, and more. The Alliance coordinated the release of the letter.  For more information, visit http://www.gwla.org.

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