Welcome to International Open Access Week 2022! To promote Open Access at Connecticut College, we are publishing one new post a day this week.
The Open Access movement continues to grow. (Wait, back up! What is open access?) In addition to increased visibility and access, openness promotes research integrity, allows for wider and interdisciplinary collaboration, and aids reproducible research.
Today’s post summarizes the newest memo from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research.” The memo recommends new guidelines for all federally funded research, beyond science and technology, including humanities and social sciences. So, whether your grant funding agency is the NEH or the NIH, the data and publications resulting from your grant funded activities will be affected. Even if you do not receive federal grant funding, the memo and resulting policy changes will likely have ripple effects throughout the scholarly research landscape.
The OSTP memo requests all federal agencies submit plans describing how they will implement key provisions:
- That all peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research are “made freely available and publicly accessible by default… without any embargo or delay….” The guidelines also specify that the formats must be machine-readable so that they are able to be used with screen readers and other assistive technologies.
- That scientific data resulting from federally funded research should also “be made freely available and publicly accessible,” to the extent that it is able. (More on open data in tomorrow’s post!)
- That agencies develop plans that explain how researchers should manage and share data, including ethical and legal limitations.
- That researchers can include costs associated with making published research and data openly available in research budgets.
Although the new guidelines allow individual agencies to create their own public access plans, all researchers should expect that agencies will, eventually, require that more research and data be made available to the public.
Interested in learning more?
- An Introduction to Open Access from JISC.
- Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research
- Scholarly Kitchen blog posts related to the Nelson memo:
