Congressional Research Service reports online
If you want to get access to a Congressional Research Service report, you have to hope that someone has made it available to OpenCRS. You may be out of luck. And that's not a good thing. Or, you may never have heard of OpenCRS, and you'll be missing out.
Here's an op-ed by Ari Schwartz of CDT on the subject. We — all of us — paid for these reports, and they should be freely available online. (They're often really great reports.)
In a little more than a year, members of the public have downloaded
more than 3.5 million CRS reports from OpenCRS.com. Making the full
catalog of these reports readily available over the Internet will sate
those demands and help produce a better-informed electorate.
I really like the candor of this quote:
The . . . telling defense for the decrepit CRS policy [keeping the reports offline] came
from former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, who was quoted as saying: “Let’s say
that I’m working on an issue and I’m trying to look for some research
that helps me to get my point across and, all of a sudden, the
Congressional Research Service sends me over something and I read it
and I say, ‘Oh, no, that’s not going to help.’ Let someone else do the
research. Why give your opposition free research?”
Hah.
=== in other news, welcome to the blogosphere, Rob Frieden!
Comments
2 Responses to “Congressional Research Service reports online”
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Would a fully open policy have the paradoxical effect of causing Congresspeople to stop or reduce their use of the service?
Hmm. No, i don't think so. Thanks to OpenCRS, lots of people are seeing these reports anyway, and I don't have the sense that this is reducing the usefulness of the reports to Congress.
But if there are other views I'd be interested.
susan