Administration Takes Faster Action on Access to Federally Funded Research

In a policy memorandum released today, Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Director John Holdren directed Federal agencies with more than $100 million in research and development spending to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication, and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research. In one swoop, Holdren may have achieved many of the aims of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), the recently introduced legislation which many feared is likely to die in committee as its predecessor FRPAA repeatedly did.