As of Feb. 14, a bipartisan group of senators introduced the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act. The bill’s purpose is to make the results of publicly funded research publicly available online. FASTR is a retooling of a past open access bill, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which has been considered several times since 2006, but has yet to reach the floor of either house (see this wiki page from the Harvard Open Access Project for a comparison of the two bills and other important information on FASTR).

A number of factors make FASTR more likely to reach the floor in the house or senate than past iterations of FRPAA. For one, Open Access to publicly-funded research has recently gained visible support from the public, as evidenced by the more the 64,000 signatures on this whitehouse.gov petition. This popularity is likely driven by the already-successful National Institutes of Health policy mandating that any research done with NIH funding be made publicly available online through the PubMed database, as well as the increase in public awareness of open access issues following last year’s high-profile boycott of Elsevier and opposition to the Research Works Act. There seems to be a wave of support building behind open access policies, and that support holds exciting possibilities for both advocates and researchers around the globe.