HELIOS Open Analysis of New OSTP Guidance
On August 25, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum on Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research that significantly alters the open scholarship landscape.
The new policy guidance advances previous federal policy in a number of impactful ways:
Immediate access: The new guidance removes the previous 12-month embargo period on article sharing, and directs federal agencies to develop policies that would require access to publications “without any embargo or delay”. As the guidance affirms, such timely sharing is key to enabling the goals of open access, including accelerated scientific discovery. Importantly, the guidance would not require authors to publish in fully open access journals that may incur costs, but instead encourages sharing through “agency-designated repositories”.
Data sharing: The guidance directs federal agencies to update their policies on data sharing to enable immediate access to the data underlying published studies. In addition, it encourages agencies to think more expansively and “develop approaches and timelines” for the sharing of data not associated with publications. These are crucial steps for improving the verifiability, integrity, and reproducibility of federally funded research.
Broader focus: The definition of ‘publications’ is expanded to potentially cover not just journal articles, but also peer-reviewed book chapters, editorials, and conference proceedings. This represents an important recognition of the diversity of research outputs, especially across different disciplines, and could help incentivize broader scholarly communication.
Equity language: Centering equity as a guiding principle will encourage agencies to think about ways they can increase access to research without unintentionally raising additional barriers. Specifically, the guidance asks agencies to include in their plans, “How to maximize equitable reach of public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications” and to further “consider measures to reduce inequities in publishing of, and access to, federally funded research and data, especially among individuals from underserved backgrounds and those who are early in their careers.”
Research reusability: The guidance emphasizes the need for publications to be shared in both machine-readable formats and under terms that allow for “use and re-use rights”. The guidance also asks agencies to develop strategies to make “data, and other such research outputs and their metadata are findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable” (i.e., FAIR). This would permit researchers, citizen scientists, or industries to build on these shared outputs, as well as take advantage of emerging technologies, like content mining and artificial intelligence, to generate new knowledge.
Metadata and PIDs: The guidance calls for agencies to share publication metadata, including funding information, and to require the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs).
Timeliness: The guidance outlines a promising timeline that both requires agencies to update their policy plans relatively quickly but also gives them ample time to roll out the changes. Larger agencies are asked to update their policy plans within six months, publish the plans by the end of 2024, and then enact the new policy within one year (by end of 2025). Smaller agencies not subject to the 2013 memo will have a year to devise their initial plans.This timeline highlights the growing need to increase access to research sooner rather than later, especially in response to emerging global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.
Comprehensive coverage: Whereas the previous policy applied only to federal agencies with $100M+ in R&D expenditures, the new guidance applies to all U.S. federal agencies and departments – a jump from 20 to over 400 federal bodies. This will dramatically increase policy reach, and eventually the volume of research openly accessible and reusable.
This is a win for open scholarship and a validation of our “mutually reinforcing vectors” theory of change. We are encouraged that the language from the White House echoes the spirit of our own co-chair’s remarks from HELIOS Open’s kickoff event: “To promote equity and advance the work of restoring the public’s trust in government science, and to advance American scientific leadership, now is the time to amend federal policy to deliver immediate public access to federally funded research.” HELIOS Open has a tremendous opportunity to provide support, guidance, and incentives to help our researchers comply with this emerging policy. We look forward to exploring this work together with you. Stay tuned for more.
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