October 26, 2022

Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research

Among the most significant actions for academia that came out of Washington DC this summer was one that will move support for Open Research in the U.S. forward by leaps and bounds. On August 25, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a policy guidance memorandum on Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research. It expands a 2013 directive to Increase Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research and provides policy guidance to federal agencies with research and development expenditures. 

The practice of Open Research is a worldwide interdisciplinary movement among researchers, universities, and funders. In broad terms it encompasses unhindered and unpaywalled access to scholarly articles, access to data from research, the ability to reproduce and verify research results, and the means to promote citizens’ trust, engagement, and participation in scientific experiments and data collection. Open Research is an interchangeable term with ‘Open Scholarship’ and ‘Open Science.’

The new guidance calls on all federal funding agencies to generate new or updated public access policies as soon as possible – and no later than December 31, 2025 – with the goal of eliminating embargos and making the results of federally funded research immediately available for the benefit of the public. 

A summary of the new guidance: 

Eliminates the current allowable 12-month embargo and calls on all federal agencies that fund research, large and small, to make taxpayer-funded research publications  journal articles available to the public immediately by default in agency-designated repositories. The memo also broadens the definition of research publications beyond peer-reviewed journal articles and gives agencies the ability to include other formats such as peer-reviewed book chapters and conference proceedings.

Calls on agencies to make the research data underlying the conclusions of scholarly articles immediately available in an agency-designated repository at the time of publication.  It also notes that further guidance will be developed identifying desirable characteristics for digital publication repositories.

Includes new provisions to improve scientific research integrity and discoverability, including making appropriate metadata available at the time of publication, and promotes the use of persistent identifiers – for example, ORCID IDs for authors and digital object identifiers (DOIs) for all research outputs.

Asks agencies to reduce inequities in both the publishing of and access to federally funded research publications and data, especially among individuals from underserved backgrounds and those who are early in their careers.

The guidance doesn’t specify a funding source for covering publication and data costs, but says that “agencies should allow researchers to include reasonable publication costs and costs associated with submission, curation, management of data, and special handling instructions and allowable expenses on all research budgets.” 

Although Open Research advocates have been urging similar action from the government for years, some of the drivers for the current timing were the real-life lessons learned about the benefits of immediate public access to research during the Covid-19 pandemic. The 2022 memorandum notes:

“When federally funded research is available to the public, it can improve lives, provide policymakers with important evidence with which to make critical decisions, accelerate the rates of discovery and translation, and drive more equitable outcomes across every sector of society. Americans were offered a window into the great benefits of immediate public access to federally funded research at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of the public health crisis, government, industry, and scientists voluntarily worked together to adopt an immediate public access policy, which yielded powerful results: research and data flowed effectively, new accessible insights super-charged the rate of discovery, and translation of science soared. The shift in practice during COVID-19 demonstrated how delivering immediate public access to federally funded research publications and data can provide near real-time returns on American taxpayer investments in science and technology.”

This change in policy from federal funders will be especially important for a research-intensive institution like UW, which in 2021 was awarded $1.45 billion in federal grants. The work funded by the grants, in turn, resulted in thousands of peer-reviewed articles and underlying data sets. 

How will it all be implemented?  The specific details remain to be worked out.  The August 25th memorandum says the OSTP Subcommittee on Open Science will provide coordination between the hundreds of federal agencies, develop guidance on desirable qualities for digital repositories, and provide overall leadership and recommendations, but agencies will develop their own implementation plans.  The Subcommittee will also coordinate engagement efforts with stakeholders – included but not limited to publishers, libraries, museums, professional societies, researchers, and other interested non-governmental parties – on federal agency public access efforts.

The OSTP Subcommittee on Open Science and federal agencies are just beginning their work and details shaping the new policy guidance implementation will be developed during the next several years. The policy guidance outlines broad outcomes but there are many yet-unanswered questions, especially about funding and the role of for-profit and not-for-profit publishers. The policy, economic, and equity issues guiding agency decisions about how to pay for open access publication for federally funded research will loom large in the shaping of the scholarly communication ecosystem. This is a matter of great interest and importance to the scholarly community at large and reports and speculation about its potential impacts have appeared in a number of news and professional venues. 

The new policy guidance will not be a magic wand that solves all the challenges inherent in our current scholarly communication ecosystem but it is a big step forward and aligns well with the open research and open scholarship goals of the University of Washington.*

The scholarly communication issues and challenges raised by the policy memo are not new, but the new guidance for federal funders provide both the impetus and opportunity for the UW community to work together to make more of its research and scholarship freely and widely available to all. The Libraries enthusiastically endorses the goals of the policy guidance and we look forward to working with campus partners and other stakeholders to connect people with knowledge, create impact for the public good, and help make the world a better place.

*UW Actions To Support Open Access Policies:

• In 2018 the Faculty of the University of Washington adopted an Open Access Policy intended to make their peer-reviewed scholarly articles freely and widely available to the people of Washington and the broader research community. This policy is similar to open access policies enacted by hundreds of organizations around the globe and reflects the University’s commitment to contribute to the public good through the widest possible sharing of its research and scholarship. The Association of Librarians of the University of Washington adopted its own Open Access Policy a year earlier.

• In the past two years the UW Faculty Senate has approved two Class C Resolutions supporting the goals of Open Science and Open Scholarship. 
  • In May 2021 the Senate approved a Resolution Regarding the Importance of Reproducibility, Openness, and Transparency in Research at UW that requests “UW researchers to include statements in their published work that attests to the reproducibility, transparency, and openness of their research whenever possible.” 
  • In April 2022 the Faculty Senate approved a Class C resolution supporting the UW Libraries’ Principles in Licensing Scholarly Resources that states, “As an institution committed to advancing the public good, we continue to work toward the creation of an open scholarly ecosystem where barriers that restrict access to research and to publishing are eliminated.”  

• One of the UW Libraries’ key Strategic Directions is to Advance Research for the Public Good. We say, “UW research attains its greatest impact on our most pressing global challenges when we advocate for open, public, and emerging forms of scholarship.”  

See also UW Libraries Investments in Open Access 

###