june06b.indd


scholarly
communication


Ray English and Peter Suber 

Public access to federally funded 
research 
The Cornyn-Lieberman and CURES bills 

Two very important pieces of legislation that would markedly increase public 
access to taxpayer­funded research have 
been introduced into the U.S. Senate. The 
Federal
Research
Public
Access
Act of 2006, 
introduced by Senator John Cornyn (R­TX) 
and cosponsored by Senator Joseph Lieber­
man (D­CT), would require free online access 
within six months of publication for virtually 
all peer­reviewed journal articles resulting 
from federally funded research. 

The American
 Center
 for
 CURES
 Act of 
2005, introduced by Lieberman and cospon­
sored by Senator Thad Cochran (R­MS), has 
a similar provision for research sponsored 
by agencies in the Department of Health and 
Human Services (HHS). 

These bills represent major steps in ongo­
ing efforts to gain public access to federally 
funded research. They deserve strong backing 
from the American academic and research 
library community. 

Rationale for the legislation 
The rationale for both the Cornyn­Lieberman 
bill and the public access provision of the 
CURES bill is straightforward. The federal 
government spends more than $55 billion 
annually to fund a wide variety of research 
in health, scientific, and other fi elds. Research 
sponsored by the National Institutes of Health 
(NIH) alone results in more than 60,000 peer­
reviewed articles per year. Wide, rapid, and 
easy access to the results of this research is 
essential for everyone who wishes to apply 
or build upon it, from other scientists and 
scholars to health care professionals, patients, 

manufacturers, teachers and students, policy­
makers, nonprofit organizations, and citizens. 
Giving taxpayers access to the non­classifi ed 
research for which they have paid will ad­
vance research and all the benefits of research, 
from health care and pollution control to 
energy independence and public safety. 

The present system of disseminating the 
results of publicly funded research is badly 
broken and severely limits access. Taxpayers 
pay for the research and very often the salary 
of the researcher, as well. Research articles 
are then published in peer­reviewed journals, 
which charge subscription fees or per­article 
access fees. The cost of subscriptions has 
risen three times faster than infl ation for 
more than 20 years, and most subscriptions 
are unaffordable for most libraries. 

Journals typically demand to own copy­
right, as well. The fundamental principle of 
the Cornyn­Lieberman bill and the public 
access provision of the CURES bill is to 
provide taxpayers free online access to the 
results of research that they fund through 
their tax dollars. 

Provisions of Cornyn-Lieberman 
The Cornyn­Lieberman bill would require 
federal agencies with extramural research 

Ray English is director of libraries at Oberlin College, chair 
of the ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee, and 
chair of the SPARC Steering Committee, e-mail: Ray. 
English@oberlin.edu; and Peter Suber is the open access 
project director at Public Knowledge, a senior researcher 
at SPARC, and a research professor of philosophy at 
Earlham College, e-mail: peters@earlham.edu 
© 2006 Ray English and Peter Suber 

362C&RL News June 2006

mailto:peters@earlham.edu
mailto:English@oberlin.edu


budgets that are more than $100 million to 
develop public access policies within one 
year of its passage. The policies developed by 
each agency would cover researchers that are 
employed, as well as those funded in whole or 
in part, by the agency. Specifi cally, the policies 
would require those researchers to submit elec­
tronic copies of their manuscripts, which have 
been accepted for publication in peer­reviewed 
journals, to the agencies that sponsored their 
research. The policies would also require that 
those manuscripts be deposited in a “stable 
digital repository” maintained by the federal 
government or in a repository approved by the 
agency. The public would gain free online ac­
cess to manuscripts as soon as practical follow­
ing publication, but not more than six months 
afterwards. The policies would also give pub­
lishers the option to replace the author’s fi nal 
version of the peer­reviewed manuscript with 
the final published version of the article. 

The bill does not require public access to 
“information used to produce fi nal manuscripts,” 
such as lab notes, preliminary data analysis, 
author’s notes, or phone logs. The bill would 
also exempt classified research, research result­
ing in works that generate revenue or royalties 
for authors, and patentable discoveries. Authors 
who do not submit their work to a journal and 
authors whose works are not accepted for 
publication in a peer­reviewed journal are also 
not covered by the legislation. 

Provisions of CURES 
The purpose of the American
Center
for
CURES

Act of 2005 is to create the American Center for 
Cures within NIH. The mission of the center 
would be to translate fundamental research into 
therapies. The bill has wide­ranging provisions 
designed to realize that purpose. 

Section 449H of the bill would require 
that the final peer­reviewed manuscripts of 
all research funded by agencies in HHS be 
made openly accessible in PubMed Central, 
the digital archive of the National Library of 
Medicine, within six months of publication. 
The bill also explicitly states that noncompli­
ance may be grounds for the funding agency 
to refuse future funding. 

Senator John Cornyn on the Federal 
Research Public Access Act of 2006 said, 
“This legislation is an opportunity for 
our government to better leverage our 
investment in research and ensure a 
greater return on that investment. By 
sharing this information quickly and 
broadly with all potential users, we can 
advance science, accelerate the pace of 
new discoveries and innovations, and 
improve the lives and welfare of people 
at home and abroad.” 

The CURES bill would cover research spon­
sored by NIH, the Centers for Disease Control 
and Prevention, the Agency for Healthcare 
Research, and other HHS agencies. HHS agen­
cies combined account for more than half of 
all U.S government funded research. 

Improving on Sabo 
The Cornyn­Lieberman and CURES bills 
significantly improve upon earlier legislation 
designed to provide public access to federally 
funded research. The Public
Access
to
Science

Act, introduced by Representative Martin Sabo 
(D­MN) in June 2003, attempted to achieve 
open access by exempting federally funded 
research from copyright protection. The Sabo 
bill, which was not vetted with the library 
community in advance, was seriously fl awed. 
By amending copyright law it attracted wide 
opposition from the content industry and 
even alienated some organizations that might 
otherwise have supported an open access 
policy. While it mandated that federally funded 
research be placed in the public domain, it did 
nothing to ensure that the research would be 
made accessible to the public online. 

Both the Cornyn­Lieberman and CURES 
bills, in contrast, mandate open access, but do 
not alter copyright law or require that research 
be placed in the public domain. Both bills 
would instead authorize agencies to invoke 
their “federal purpose license,” which gives 
them a nonexclusive license to “reproduce, 
publish, or otherwise use the work for federal 
purposes, and to authorize others to do so” 
(2CFR215.36[a] and 45CFR74.36[a]). 

June 2006  363 C&RL News 



In short, the Sabo bill would have put 
federally funded research into the public 
domain without providing open access to 
it, while the Cornyn­Lieberman and CURES 
bills would mandate open access to federally 
funded research without putting it into the 
public domain. 

Comparison to NIH policy 
The Cornyn­Lieberman and CURES bills 
would signifi cantly strengthen the public ac­
cess policy announced by NIH last May. The 
NIH policy is voluntary; researchers are en­
couraged to submit their fi nal peer­reviewed 
manuscripts to PubMed Central, but they are 
not required to do so. The NIH policy also al­
lows delays or embargoes of up to 12 months 
between the date of publication and the date 
of public access through PubMed Central. The 
Cornyn­Lieberman and CURES bills go beyond 
the current NIH policy by requiring deposit, 
and they shorten the permissible delay for 
deposit and open access to within 6 months 
of publication, rather than 12. 

364C&RL News June 2006

The NIH policy was weakened by publish­
er lobbying prior to adoption and is not meet­
ing its goals. That is evident in the very low 
participation rate by researchers. So far only 
three to five percent of eligible manuscripts 
are being deposited under the policy. Because 
deposit is not required, most researchers are 
not taking this extra step. Moreover, they are 
often pressured by their publishers to withhold 
their articles from NIH for as long as possible. 
NIH could have invoked its federal­purpose 
license to authorize its public access policy, but 
it decided to rely instead on publisher consent. 
As a result, most publishers with policies on 
NIH­funded authors have chosen to impose 
12­month embargoes on deposits. By contrast, 
the Cornyn­Lieberman and CURES bills do not 
rely on publisher consent and therefore do 
not accommodate publisher resistance. They 
ensure both participation and timeliness by 
mandating them. 

The advisory group established by NIH 
to review the implementation of its policy 
recognized the flaws in the NIH public access 
policy. Nine of eleven members of the Public 
Access Working Group voted on November 15, 
2005, to recommend that NIH revise its policy 
in order to require deposit of all NIH­funded 
research in PubMed Central. The committee 
also recommended that NIH put a six­month 
deadline on the deposit and access require­
ment. The National Library of Medicine Board 
of Regents made a similar recommendation to 
NIH in January 2006. The Cornyn­Lieberman 
and CURES bills, if passed, will bring about these 
changes at NIH, even if the working group and 
NLM regents recommendations are not adopted. 
Conversely, those recommendations, if adopted, 
would bring the NIH policy to the new and 
higher Cornyn­Lieberman and CURES standards, 
even if the bills are not passed. 

When the House of Representatives in­
structed NIH to adopt a public access policy in 
June 2004, it asked for both the public­access 
mandate and the six­month deadline. In that 
sense, therefore, the working group recom­
mendation and the Cornyn­Lieberman and 
CURES bills would bring the NIH policy back 
in line with the original intent of Congress. 



Bipartisan and international support 
It is especially heartening to see bipartisan 
Congressional support for the principle of 
open access to federally funded research. 
Both the Cornyn­Lieberman and CURES bills 
are sponsored by a conservative Republican 
and a moderate Democrat. They should gain 
additional backing from members of Congress 
from both parties. Congressional support for 
the earlier NIH public access policy, including 
the proposed requirement for deposit, also 
came from both sides of the political aisle. 

The Cornyn­Lieberman bill, the public ac­
cess provision of the CURES bill, and proposed 
revisions to the NIH policy are part of growing 
support throughout the world for the principle 
of public access to taxpayer­funded research. 
The United Kingdom is moving toward adop­
tion of a similar policy that will apply to all 
government­funded research. Following on 
the July 2004 recommendation of the report 
from the House of Commons Science and 
Technology Committee, the Research Councils 
of the United Kingdom (RCUK), which fund 
the majority of research at UK universities, 
announced a draft policy in June 2005 that 
would require deposit of government­funded 
research in open­access institutional and dis­
ciplinary repositories. Announcement of the 
RCUK’s final policy is expected soon. Other 
countries are considering similar policies. 

Importance for libraries 
The Cornyn­Lieberman and CURES bills, if 
adopted, would substantially increase pub­
lic access to the results of federally funded 

research. Their adoption would result in a 
major gain in access for faculty, students, other 
researchers, and the general public. Both bills 
protect the system of peer­reviewed journals. 
Both leave copyright law unchanged, let ex­
tramural grantees copyright their articles, and 
allow them to transfer copyright to journals. 
The six­month delay before research is made 
openly accessible will shield journal publishers 
from potential subscription or licensing cancel­
lations. Journals will still have the exclusive 
right to distribute the final published version 
of articles, unless they allow those versions to 
be deposited by authors in repositories. 

A coalition of library and public interest 
groups led by SPARC has worked diligently with 
the offices of Senators Cornyn and Lieberman 
on the development and introduction of these 
bills. The Cornyn­Lieberman bill and the public 
access provisions of the CURES bill have been 
carefully considered by representatives of the 
academic and research library community. 

These bills represent an extraordinary 
opportunity to transform access to scientifi c, 
technical, and medical research. Their passage 
into law would give strong impetus to the 
worldwide movement for public access to gov­
ernment­funded research—and to the open 
access movement generally. We hope you will 
join us in expressing enthusiastic support for 
both bills to your senators and representatives. 
Please ask your senators to become cospon­
sors of the bills and also encourage your rep­
resentatives to support them in the House of 
Representatives, once comparable legislation 
has been introduced there. 

(“Training
programs
.
.
.”
continued
from
page
358)


Conclusion systematic plan to provide training for all 
Education is a core mission of all libraries. their personnel. 
Libraries should make the same commit­
ment to educating their personnel that Notes 
they have made to educating their users. 1. See www.ala.org/ala/acrl/presidentspage 
Training is pivotal in the development of /presidentspageacrl.htm. 
library employees. It enables them to pro­ 2. “Charting our Future: ACRL Strategic 
vide better service, to become more skilled Plan 2020” can be found on ACRL’s Web site 
employees, and to enhance their personal at www.ala.org/ala/acrl/aboutacrl/whatisacrl 
development. Libraries should develop a /acrlstratplan/stratplan.htm. 

June 2006  365 C&RL News 

www.ala.org/ala/acrl/aboutacrl/whatisacrl
www.ala.org/ala/acrl/presidentspage