Update on CRS Reports Access
Senator Lieberman urged the new Chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Senator Chuck Schumer, to help foster better public access to CRS Reports. Perhaps our letters to Congressmen on this issue helped spur this on? One can hope, right? Oh, let me believe it is so! ;-) Here are some excerpts from Lieberman's letter to Chairman Schumer:
Given their value to constituents, I strongly believe that we need a system that ensures widespread public access to CRS reports. Last Congress, I introduced S. Res. 401 along with Senators McCain, Collins, Cornyn, Feingold, Harkin, Leahy, Lugar, and McCaskill, to create such as system. A few months after the introduction of our bill, the Rules Committee authorized the Director of CRS to develop a system that would allow Senators to place individual CRS reports on their official website and would have them automatically updated. I was pleased by this development, but it does not go far enough. I believe a more effective system would provide constituents with tools similar to those used by Congressional staff, with material presented by topic and the capability to search across all reports and issue briefs. Unfortunately, the present system does not allow this basic level of functionality. A robust system would also help restore the equity of access that is sorely needed. For years, CRS reports have been sold by companies to those who can afford to pay. Non-profit groups have also begun posting these reports for free on their websites. Earlier this month, thousands of reports – representing several years’ worth of work by CRS analysts – were placed on the wikileaks.org site. These ad hoc efforts allow more reports to enter the public domain, but they do not ensure the dissemination of the most accurate and up-to-date information. Nor are they likely to be discovered by all those who might desire the reports. These developments only highlight the need for an officially-sanctioned system such as the one I have proposed. By establishing a clearinghouse that would offer all reports and would be automatically updated, we could ensure that those with power and those without have equal access to this important resource. I hope that in your new role as Chairman of the Rules Committee you carefully review this issue and consider recommending the creation of a more comprehensive system so that CRS reports can be easily accessed by the taxpayers who pay for them.I look forward to watching further developments. In the mean time, continue to contact your Congressmen (and Senator Schumer!) as instructed in my previous posts, CRS Reports to the People! Parts One and Two. Continue reading
bulk data downloads
Recommended reading: O'Reilly Radar - Bulk Data Downloads: A Breakthrough in Government Transparency by Tim O'Reilly (March 4, 2009): "What would it mean if all the bulk data from the Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, Government Printing Office, and "the appropriate entities of the House of Representatives" were made available?" Here's an excerpt from the appropriations bill that's the focus of the post - "*Public Access to Legislative Data* - There is support for enhancing public access to legislative documents, bill status, summary information, and other legislative data through more direct methods such as bulk data downloads and other means of no-charge digital access to legislative databases..." O'Reilly was especially struck by the possibilities embedded in that final passage - "bulk data downloads and other means of no-charge digital access to legislative databases" and the specific reference to agencies ... Read the full Radar post here! Continue reading
CIO2.0 – White House Names “First Federal Chief Information Officer”
The appointment of Vivek Kundra to become the White House's "first federal chief information officer" caught my eye in a NYT Caucus alert: As reported by The Caucus, The Politics and Government Blog of the Times [New York Times, Thursday, March 5th], "[i]n a 25-minute conference call, Mr. Kundra discussed some of his plans and interests, including his intention to extend the use of “cloud computing” in the federal government and to create a data.gov web site that will put vast amounts of government information into the public domain..." [emphasis added] Perhaps Mr. Kundra meant to say he would make public domain government information more accessible to the people by publishing it freely in an open access government site. The post continues, Mr. Kundra "sketched out an ambition that is hardly modest: to shatter the assumption that government technology automatically must lag behind the private sector...[H]e will be expected to oversee a push to expand uses of cutting-edge technology. He will have wide powers over federal technology spending, over information sharing between agencies, over greater public access to government information and over questions of security and privacy..." [emphasis added] "Mr. Kundra ... likes to refer to citizens as “co-creators.” Infoworld has an informative, brief article on cloud computing: Galen Gruman, Eric Knorr. What cloud computing really means: The next big trend sounds nebulous, but it's not so fuzzy when you view the value proposition from the perspective of IT professionals. Infoworld (April 07, 2008). Continue reading
Bulk data and Legislative Information 2.0
Tim O'Reilly writes that bulk data of Congressional information may soon be a reality. Congressman Mike Honda (D-CA 15th District) an interesting rider explanatory statement the subcommittee was working on which would require the agencies that the U.S. Congress to distribute their data in bulk. No doubt this was due in no small part to the wonderful folks at the Sunlight Foundation and many other govt transparency activists. The rider explanatory statement has made it into Division G - Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2009, the section that Honda's subcommittee is working on, but not in the current text of the bill. You can track the changes of the bill with GovTrack.us bill tracker (I hope Tim is reading this because he lamented the lack of change control :-) ):
The money quote on the H.R.1105 appropriations Omnibus bill rider explanatory statement is this paragraph here:
*Public Access to Legislative Data* - There is support for enhancing public access to legislative documents, bill status, summary information, and other legislative data through more direct methods such as bulk data downloads and other means of no-charge digital access to legislative databases. The Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, and Government Printing Office and the appropriate entities of the House of Representatives are directed to prepare a report on the feasibility of providing advanced search capabilities. This report is to be provided to the Committees on Appropriations of the House and Senate within 120 days of the release of Legislative Information System 2.0.Continue reading
Support open access to govt funded research!
A couple of weeks ago, we posted a call to action against H.R. 801: The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act. The bill, re-introduced by Rep. John Conyers, D-MI), would reverse the NIH Public Access Policy regarding public access to taxpayer-funded research and make it impossible for other federal agencies to put similar policies into place. Now, both the Huffington Post and Laurence Lessig have posted calls to action against H.R. 801 as well. Lessig is especially eloquent about this issue and nails the argument for open access journals. Plus, this Maplight (Money And Politics) report shows contributions received from book, newspaper and periodical publishing interests to H.R.801 sponsors -- a small price to pay for the profits those commercial publishers stand to gain right?!
The first important word to emphasize in the last sentence is "publishers." For unlike the ordinary market for creative work, here, the author isn't paid for his work through the copyright system. It is the government (indirectly) paying for the research that the author (a scientist) creates. Scientists write articles as part of their job; other scientists peer-review those articles (usually for free); and journals then publish those articles without paying the author anything. Those journals, however, then charge libraries across the world an increasingly high rate to get access to the research in those journals. As the industry has become more concentrated, those rates have skyrocketed -- rising much faster than inflation. The "open access movement" was born to create an alternative to this. Even if restrictive copyright was a necessary evil in the days of dead-tree based publishing, it was still an evil. High costs restrict access. The business model of the scientist is to spread his or her knowledge as widely as possible. Open access journals, such as, for example, those created by the Public Library of Science, have adopted a different publishing model, to guarantee that all all research is freely accessible online (under the freest Creative Commons license) immediately, to anyone around the world. This guarantee of access, however, is not purchased by any compromise in academic standards. There is still a peer-review process. There is still even a paper-based publication.I hope you'll agree the H.R. 801 is a disturbing piece of legislation and I reiterate the call to action against H.R.801 Continue reading