Oalib offers to help people search open access articles

A bill that requires free public access to articles resulting from federally funded research was introduced into the US Congress, delighting supporters of open access.

The bill, with the snappy acronym FASTR (fair access to science and technology research), would mandate research agencies to give the public access to papers no later than six months after their publication. At present, the US National Institutes of Health requires its research to be publicly accessible after 12 months,

A previous, similar bill, known as the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), has been introduced into Congress three times before — in May 2006, April 2009 and February 2012 — but never got to the voting stage.

FASTR is slightly different, mainly because of an added focus that papers should be made open not just to read, but also to re-use (such as by text mining). one said that on a post.

This is really a good message for Open access supporters who are trying to make it more useful to citizens to use these products. Oalib may help users to find open access academic articles without any restriction and access full text of these papers. Oalib is not just a repository but also a search tool for worldwide open access scholarly articles suitable for students, teachers, researchers and librarians. You can have a try to use www.oalib.com.