On August 25, 2022, the White House issued a press release and a detailed memorandum announcing groundbreaking new guidance on public access to federally-funded research. These measures are intended to increase public trust in science, increase transparency of the use of governmental funding, and reduce inequities in the scientific process.
Key components of the new guidance include:
- All taxpayer-funded research products must be made freely available immediately to the public upon publication—without a waiting period or embargo.
- The new guidance expands the scope of the existing rules to cover all federal agencies, regardless of grant volume, and covers more kinds of research outputs (now includes book chapters, editorials, and conference proceedings in addition to journal articles).
- The research must be in a machine-readable format that makes the work available for data mining and computational analysis. The data associated with articles must also be made freely available immediately, so results can be duplicated and validated.
- Research outputs must display associated funding agencies, authors, and author affiliations. Additionally, all research components must make use of persistent identifiers such as DOIs.
- Agencies must take action to reduce inequities in access (reading) and publishing. “Reasonable publishing costs” should be an allowable use of funding.
- When will these new rules go into effect? The answer varies by agency. Unlike the previous (2013) guidance, the new guidance affects projects funded by all federal agencies. Please stay abreast of your own funding agency’s timeline for specific effective dates.
How can you ensure your research is meeting public access standards? Remember, meeting the OA mandate does not require payments from authors. The JHU Libraries can help! We provide many resources to help you publish your work OA, post pre-prints and accepted manuscripts in our institutional repository, and avoid predatory publishers.
Stay tuned to this space for further updates and information. If you have specific questions, please reach out to your librarian/informationist, or Laurel Crawford.