'Dueling Bills'

Many researchers have been busy protesting the proposed Research Works Act, a bill that would limit public access to research funded with taxpayers' money. But now, says ScienceInsider's Jocelyn Kaiser, a second group of lawmakers has proposed a "dueling bill" — the Federal Research Public Access Act. This new bill would make any scientific paper funded with public money freely available on the Internet, Kaiser says. "[It] would expand to other research agencies the National Institutes of Health's 4-year-old policy requiring investigators it funds to submit copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts for posting in a public database," she adds. "The bill would also set at 6 months the length of time an agency can wait to make the paper public after it appears in a journal (NIH's current policy is 12 months)."