In November 2005, it was announced that FBIS would become the newly formed Open Source Center, tasked with the collection and analysis of publicly available intelligence.

[1] On 26 February 1941, President Roosevelt directed that $150,000 be allocated for creation of the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (FBMS) under the authority of the Federal Communications Commission.

The mandate of the FBMS was to record, translate, transcribe and analyze shortwave propaganda radio programs that were being beamed at the United States by the Axis powers.

The year following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the system gained importance and changed its name to the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service partly to make it sound more like a war agency.

Its original mission revolved around radio and press agency monitoring, built on what was already becoming an “almost mature, trained and disciplined” organization from the war experience.

In 2007, Readex announced its plans to create a digital edition entitled Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1941–1996.

In addition, a few of the bureaus were located on territory belonging to or administered by the U.S. such as Key West, Florida, Bahia Sucia, Puerto Rico,[9] the Panama Canal Zone, etc.

The Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) was a United States government defense-funded organization that was absorbed into FBIS but its funding and personnel did not transfer.

In 2012, Readex, a division of NewsBank, began releasing its digital edition entitled Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) Reports, 1957–1994.