CGA NEWS
(4-9-15)
To: CGA
From: APLU Congressional and Governmental Affairs Staff
APLU and the Association of American Universities (AAU) sent a letter yesterday to the Consumer Electronics Association as a response to their communications with universities urging institutions remove their names from the 145 university sign on letter expressing concern with H.R. 9, the Innovation Act. The APLU/AAU letter further clarifies the concerns of the higher education community and reiterates our strong desire to find an appropriate balance between combatting patent trolls and retaining the strength of patents which are crucial to technology transfer. Attached is a sample of the letters the CEA has been sending to university presidents, board members, and others.
On April 7, APLU joined AAU in sending letters of support to sponsors of three pieces of legislation that would make journal articles resulting from federally funded scientific research freely available online.
The letters were sent to the sponsors of the Fair Access to Science Technology Research Act of 2015 (FASTR, H.R.1477/S.779) and the Public Access to Public Science Act (PAPS, H.R.1426).
FASTR and PAPS would effectively reinforce in statute the public access policy promulgated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) governing peer-reviewed articles resulting from federally funded research. FASTR would require all federal agencies funding $100 million or more in extramural research expenditures to create federal research public access policies, comparable to the Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). PAPS would require the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Weather Service (NWS) to create federal research public access policies comparable to the Public Access Policy of the NIH.
The letters can be found here:
The MIT Washington Office invites CGA to attend the release of their report: “The Future Postponed – Why Declining Investment in Basic Research Threatens a U.S. Innovation Deficit”. The release will take place Monday, April 27, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. APLU is a cosponsor of this event.
For further information and to RSVP please click here. The report will be available on April 27 at this link.
The attached community sign-on letter is being circulated by the Coalition for Education Funding, the Coalition for Health Funding, and the Campaign to Invest in America’s Workforce. The letter urges House and Senate appropriators to “restore the Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 302(b) allocation for the Labor, HHS, Education and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee to at least the FY 2010 level of $163.6 billion." The 302(b) allocation is the amount of funding the House and Senate Appropriations Committees provide to the individual subcommittees.
APLU is signing the letter. Organizational sign-ons are requested by COB Friday, April 24. To sign your institution on, please click here.
The CGA Spring Meeting registration is now open! You should have received a personalized email invitation last week. The meeting will begin at 8:30 am on Wednesday, May 6 and continue through 5:00 pm on Thursday, May 7, 2015. Additionally, for CGA who can make it, we encourage participation in a pre-meeting session at 4pm on Tuesday, May 5 – details to follow. A meeting summary is available here. The link to register is available here.