American taxpayers spend more than $100 million a year supporting the work of the Congressional Research Service, a little-known but highly regarded division of the Library of Congress.
But unlike the library itself, the research service is by law exclusively for the use of members of Congress. Only they and their staffs have access to the reports and memorandums it generates, and only they can decide to make its work public. ...
[U]ntil recently, the only comprehensive source for the reports — there is no public index of them — was a small company, Penny Hill Press. Based in Maryland, Penny Hill Press sells the reports to lawyers, universities, lobbyists and corporations, as well as to Gallery Watch, which makes them available online.
“We wear out a lot of shoe leather and get cauliflower ear on the phone and use e-mail and every other trick we can, and we manage to get virtually all of the new C.R.S. documents,” said Walter Seager, owner of Penny Hill.
Mr. Seager said there were about 20 new documents, including updates to reports, each day. He started the effort in 1992, and he and one of his sons do most of the work finding the reports and updates. His wife, a dental hygienist, helps run the business.
“I’m 70 years old and getting tired, but my son is younger, so this will continue until such time as C.R.S. or Congress does the right thing and makes the reports freely available to the public,” Mr. Seager said. ...
Janine D’Addario, a spokeswoman for the research service, said that by law, its work is to be exclusive and confidential to Congress. Additionally, a provision in the appropriations bill that finances the service each year forbids it to make its work public. ...
A bipartisan group of senators, including John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Patrick J. Leahy Democrat of Vermont, has tried for the last decade to make the reports public.
A spokesman for Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who is the new chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, said Mr. Schumer was “aware of the arguments for making these reports public” and was reviewing the current policy.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, who makes several of the reports available on his Web site, has twice proposed legislation to make the reports public, but to no avail. He did so again last week.
“For too long, C.R.S. reports have been available to the public only on a haphazard basis,” Mr. Lieberman said in an e-mail message. “These reports inform members of Congress and their staffs on a wide range of issues. The American people, who pay for these reports, should be able to learn from this same expert analysis.”
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
