Illinois Sen. Daniel Biss introduced the Open Access to Research Articles bill in February to require all eight public institutions of higher education in Illinois to develop an open access policy allowing their research to be available to the public for free. Last Wednesday, to offer more legitimacy to the proposal, Biss filed Senate Amendment No. 2, which requires each of the eight universities to establish an Open Access to Research Task Force.

“Task forces are usually issued when lawmakers are not quite ready to vote on a new and unfamiliar topic,” Biss said in an email.

This task force will allow committees to familiarize lawmakers with the ideas and enable the University to come up with the best possible way to further the aim of open access.

Biss said there are many options to consider when discussing the bill.

“Illinois could adopt a statewide policy as in the introduced bill, something no other state has done yet, or each public university could adopt its own policy,” Biss said. “(I am) confident that if universities study the issue, they will come back to the Legislature with valuable evidence and ideas lawmakers can use to move toward the goal of open access.”

Sarah Shreeves, scholarly commons associate professor and library administrator, said she is an advocate for open research. But because of the way the bill is currently structured, she said she thinks there are more productive ways to achieve open access.

“I’m in favor of open access to research and finding a way to increase the ways that the general public can get access to research, as well as researchers who are at institutions in regions or countries that have fewer resources to get access to the research that they need,” Shreeves said. “However, I actually think it will cause more challenges than perhaps solve the problems that Sen. Biss wants to solve.”

Susan Singleton, assistant vice president and executive director of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois, said trying to asses the bill’s impact on the University or its libraries is premature because, if passed, the act will not go into effect until January 2015.

“Since the recommendations could and will differ for each university, so will the impact on the university libraries,” she said.

In addition to the possibility of the Open Access to Research Articles Act passing in Illinois, the United States Executive Office of the President enacted the Office of Science and Technology Policy in February. This policy requires each federal agency with over $100 million in annual conduct of research and development expenditures to develop a plan supporting increased public access to results of research funded by the federal government.

Shreeves said because most faculty members are not actively engaged in this area of open access, the potential double mandate of the policies might cause opposition.

“The fact that (the requirement) is coming from the federal government combined with the state makes it a complicated picture in terms of how the institution finds ways to support the activity that will have to take place,” Shreeves said.

Megan can be reached at [email protected].