This past weekend, OpenCRS reached an important milestone.  The website, maintained by CDT, hit three million reports downloaded.  The website, as of this writing, contains 11,361 CRS reports that have been collected in a number of ways, including collections from groups such as the Federation of American Scientists and the National Council for Science and the Environment, and from individual citizens requesting reports from Members of Congress, then submitting them to OpenCRS.  The one way they haven’t been collected is straight from the Congressional Research Service itself.

CRS has been a closed book for a long time, and it’s about to get just a bit worse, as Steven Aftergood from Secrecy News reports.  The director of CRS has put in place a new media interaction policy intended to limit CRS researchers’ communications with the media.  We’re not convinced that closing off CRS even further is the right move at this point in time.

Aftergood’s blog post contained an additional interesting note that caught my eye, however, as he points out that CRS is becoming more and more important to the society at large, and to the media in particular.  He mentions that “the number of citations to CRS in the Nexis news database rose from 2,076 in 2004 to 3,101 in 2005 to 4,179 in 2006.”  I think it’s no great coincidence that OpenCRS was launched in the summer of 2005, providing the media with access to the CRS reports they needed to write their stories.

Anyone interested in seeing more CRS reports can do two things: First, check out the front page of OpenCRS and request the report we have listed on the top from your Congressman.  Second, ask your Representative and Senators to support the McCain/Leahy/Shays efforts to force CRS to make its reports readily available to the public.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 10:20 am and is filed under CDT, Open Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.