Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) are pushing a package of legislative proposals that would create, for the first time, penalties for agencies that ignore Freedom of Information Act requests. They also want to create a position for an independent arbiter -- an ombudsman for FOIA -- who would help referee conflicts between the public and the government while requiring departments to provide more information on how quickly they process requests. "A number of the reforms included in these bills are pretty basic in a lot of places, including my home state of Texas," said Cornyn, a former state attorney general. "In Washington, there's no real presumption of openness in the culture."....While it is easy to find supporters of the plan, it is much more difficult to scare up its opponents. "A number of my colleagues have been very skeptical about any of this because they don't view it like I do as a right of the citizenry to know what the government is doing. They view it as a favor we would be doing the press," Cornyn said, without naming names. "The problem with this issue is it's such a good government position that it's hard to drag people out into the light of day where they'll have a debate with you. . . . What happens is that you get a passive-aggressive attitude where people seemingly are willing to work with you, but when it comes to actually moving legislation, it's pretty tough slogging."
(PS: Cornyn is also one of the Senate's strongest defenders of OA to publicly-funded research.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/06/2005 10:28:00 AM.
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.
