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The article reports on a proposed bill that would require federally funded scientists to make their accepted papers freely available online for public within 6 months of publication. The bill, introduced last week by senators John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas and Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat from Connecticut, would make mandatory a voluntary National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy and extend it to every major federal research agency, from the National Science Foundation to the Department of Defense. The House and Senate appropriations committees had asked NIH to develop such a policy after patient groups insisted they should have free access to biomedical studies. The request has been ignored by most NIH grantees. Meanwhile, an NIH advisory committee has recommended that the policy be mandatory and that the 12-month limit be reduced to 6 months for most journals. The Cornyn-Lieberman bill would require NIH to incorporate those changes. But the bill also would mandate a similar plan at any U.S. agency funding at least $100 million a year in extramural research. The manuscripts could be posted in existing archives, such as a university server or arXiv, the physics preprint server.