Anew law proposed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., would require all publicly funded research to be available online, at no charge, within six months of its publication. For statistics-hungry undergraduate and graduate students alike, this proposal is a godsend.

The Federal Research Public Access Act — which also is supported by John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas — is a logical extension of the Freedom of Information Act. When research is financed with tax dollars, it is every citizen’s right to access the information. And though critics have opposed the plan because the free access could hurt circulation and advertising sales of scholarly journals, reports financed by the federal government should be compiled for the purpose of discovery and fact-finding — not to supplement income for magazines.

The law would provide for a six-month grace period to make the information accessible on the Internet, which is a reasonable time span for researchers and scientists to gather what potentially could be hundreds of pages of documents and organize them for public usage. No one desires some jumble of compiled work with no discernible indexing or ordering system; this is a chance, albeit a mandated one, for some regulation in the chaotic world of government grants.

As Lieberman pointed out, not everyone has a library next door, and as the nation becomes more and more digital, it only makes sense to require documents that would be readily available at the reference desk now to be easily reached via the Web.

The last prominent criticism goes straight for incompetence. Patricia S. Schroeder, president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, said that releasing research to the public is dangerous because readers will inevitably misunderstand what it is trying to purport, according to a Washington Post article. Publishing true information only can alleviate a situation of misinterpreting the millions of unauthenticated and unreliable forms of data on the Internet right now. It is not the place of scientists to deny something to the American public based solely on their preconceptions of our stupidity.

It comes down to accountability, both of the public whose dollars are being spent and of the various government agencies who are allocating the funds. An open system will prevent different departments from investigating the same issues, and unguarded information will promote further work.