Public Access to Federally Funded Research

Abstract

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a new memo requiring all federal agencies that fund research provide immediate public access to resulting research data and scholarly publications. This new memo removes the option of a 12 months embargo, and it extends the requirement agencies with less than $100 million in annual research and development expenditures. This column investigates the possible impacts of the broader policy, including introducing the public access requirement to new agencies and academic disciplines, and how a repository approach to public access might intersect with publisher provided open access.

Keywords:

• OSTP
• OA mandates
• funder mandates
• research data

Introduction

Since 2013, policies governing public access to federally funded research output have been shaped by a memo issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). That memo required “each Federal agency with over $100 million in annual conduct of research and development expenditures to develop a plan to support increased public access to the results of research funded by the Federal Government” (Holdren, 2013, p. 2). While that memo and the policies created to comply with it have had a great impact on public access to research, there has also been no shortage of change and development in scholarly publishing in the intervening years. In order to continue to advance the goal of public access to federally funded research, in August of 2022, the OSTP released a new memo that significantly builds upon the earlier one (Nelson, 2022). In this piece I will refer to the 2022 memo as the Nelson memo, as it was written by Alondra Nelson of the OSTP and will refer to the 2013 memo written by John P. Holdren as the Holdren memo.

The Nelson memo expands on the requirements of the Holdren memo in some key ways. First, it extends the requirement for a public access policy to all federal agencies that fund research, not just those with over $100 million in such funding. Second, it now makes the requirement for public access immediate rather than allowing for a 12-month embargo. The new requirements do not take effect immediately. Agencies are given until December 31, 2024 to publish their plans and another full year after that for the plans to take effect. While it is too early to know exactly the effects that these new requirements will have, this column will attempt to explore some of the possible changes librarians and researchers may see as a result of the Nelson memo.

A broader mandate

The Nelson memo includes an expansion from a subset of federal agencies that fund research and development to all such agencies. In some respects, the impact of this expansion could be seen as fairly minor. According to the Economic Landscape of Federal Public Access Policy, a report issued by the OSTP in 2022 in response to the Nelson memo, “Just six federal agencies—the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Agriculture (USDA), and NASA—account for more than 94% of the approximately $150 billion in funds obligated to federal research and development” (p. 11). While including agencies with less than $100 million in research and development funds will only provide public access to a small percentage of research output, it will bring public access to new agencies, including some that focus on disciplines outside of the science and technology fields associated with the large research agencies mentioned above.

As an example, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) will now be subject to the public access requirement. A public access requirement for publications resulting from NEH-funded research could bring challenges for the agency, as well as the authors and those helping them navigate the process. One such challenge would be interpreting the memo, which often seems to be written from a science and technology perspective, for a very different set of disciplines. The memo emphasizes that it applies to peer reviewed scholarly publications, including journal articles and book chapters. Researched funded by the NEH may result in a peer reviewed journal article, or it may result in a monograph, a chapter, or a conference paper that does not go through peer review. It is difficult to say how the agency might address this. They could hold to the memo’s emphasis on peer reviewed scholarship, which could lead to very different levels of public access for projects funded by the same grant program depending on the researcher’s choice of how to disseminate the results of the funded research. Or perhaps they could present a plan that is broader in scope and requires public access for a wider variety of scholarly products than the memo stipulates. Agencies that focus on the humanities and arts may also reach scholars that are less familiar with OA publishing and data management plans, requiring more support from librarians or research offices to work through new federal requirements.

Green and gold

The Nelson memo states “that all peer-reviewed scholarly publications authored or coauthored by individuals or institutions resulting from federally funded research are made freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication” (p. 3). This strong emphasis on repositories seems on the surface like a victory for Green OA advocates that prefer a path to open publishing that favors freely accessible repositories over publisher-provided Gold OA funded by APCs. And there is already an excellent model for federal agencies providing a robust repository in PubMed Central, the OA repository of the NIH. The National Library of Medicine describes PubMed Central as “a repository for journal literature deposited by participating publishers, as well as for author manuscripts that have been submitted in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy and similar policies of other research funding agencies” (National Library of Medicine [NLM], 2021). Full text files for deposited articles are available directly in PMC, and the repository is available as a full text collection in library discovery indexes and link resolver knowledge bases.

However, the repositories hosted by some other agencies look rather different. The Department of Energy Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science (DOE PAGES), for example, relies extensively on journal publishers to provide full text access to sponsored projects. Instead of hosting full text files like PubMed Central, DOE PAGES frequently includes links to the publisher’s version of record. As a result, DOE PAGES functions more like a pathway to Gold OA, relying on publishers to host the content and provide public access. Additionally, it isn’t integrated with library discovery tools the way PubMed Central is. So, DOE PAGES provides an example of a federal agency’s public access repository that lends more strength to the Gold rather than the Green OA approach. Federal agencies that are new to the public access requirement may end up with a variety of approaches to their designated repositories, but there seems to be precedent both for repositories that provide direct access to full text articles and those that rely on publisher access.

Conclusion

The Nelson memo seeks to provide public access to research data and peer reviewed scholarship resulting from federal research funding, immediately upon publication. While the goals are clearly spelled out, much remains uncertain about the eventual implementation of this policy guidance. New disciplines and agencies are being brought into the public access requirement, and they may different research and publication practices that require different implementation that what was seen following the Holdren memo. In addition, the agencies that had already implemented public access policies often took diverging approaches to meet the requirement, with some building robust OA repositories and others relying on publishers to provide public access. Over the next few years, the publishing and implementation of new public access plans is likely to affect many aspects of scholarly publishing.