Section 154 of PL 115-141, passed earlier in 2018 and now codified at 2 U.S.C. § 166a, mandates that many common types of CRS Reports must be published for free on a publicly accessible website.
Before this law was passed, Members of Congress needed to choose to release reports on an individual basis for them to become public. There was no comprehensive, publicly available, official location for accessing CRS Reports. Reports that did become public were collected on non-profit websites maintained by open-government advocates or were sold to customers by legal information vendors. It was weird, and usually pretty confusing, even for experienced researchers. But now that is all changing!