New Open Scholarship Guidelines for Publicly Funded Research
On August 25, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) published a memorandum regarding the open sharing of government-funded research. The memo, Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, issues guidance to all federal agencies to develop plans ensuring that publicly funded research outputs will be openly available. This new and exciting commitment to knowledge equity will have important implications for University of Maryland researchers who are supported by federal grants and other financial investments.
With this announcement, the OSTP joins the University of Maryland and other research institutions who have already committed to equitable access and recognized the impact that open access to information will have on scientific advancement and our society.
The August 25th memo expands on a previous 2013 federal policy, which directed agencies spending more than $100 million dollars per year in research funding to ensure that publications and other research outputs were made publicly available. The new guidance takes several further steps to advance access to research, including:
- The memo calls for the expansion of open access publishing requirements beyond the 20 agencies implicated in the 2013 policy. All federal agencies, regardless of the amount of money that organization spends on research funding are asked to ensure that research is openly published.
- Access to research outputs must be immediate and simultaneous with first publication, abolishing a 12 month embargo period publishers and authors had previously been allowed to impose on works.
- In addition to written research papers and reports, data needed to validate research claims is to be made immediately available. Agencies are encouraged to make book chapters, monographs, white papers, and other publication formats available, as well as journal articles.
- Materials will be made available in machine readable formats with appropriate accompanying metadata. This increased focus on proper construction of digital components will increase the accessibility, indexing, and distribution of research materials in an online research ecosystem.
How are UMD Libraries Supporting Faculty in Meeting the New Federal Guidance?
UMD Libraries are raising awareness and collecting information on federal rules and guidelines
Although the OSTP issued its memo in August 2022 it laid out a a delayed action plan that required federal agencies to develop their own infrastructure plans and mandates for funded researchers. These plans must be be completed and published by Dec. 31, 2024, and to go into effect by 2025. We are already speaking to the UMD community about these new government initiatives. As new discussions and plans are released to the public, we will collect and provide access to those here on the Libraries website and in other communications.
Green OA resources through the Equitable Access Policy and institutional repository, DRUM
We do not yet know what each of the federal agencies will require of researchers in order to comply with the OSTP guidance. The NIH, for instance, who have been under a federal public access mandate since 2013, have developed their own repository with requisite formatting and deposit formats. However, one way to make research available is through the process known as Green Open Access, whereby the researcher obtains or retains the right to make a version of their work openly available in a repository, while still working with a traditional publisher.
The University of Maryland Equitable Access Policy requires all eligible faculty members at University of Maryland to grant certain nonexclusive rights over their scholarly articles to the University of Maryland and allows the University to distribute peer-reviewed versions of the articles free-of-charge to the general public, through DRUM, the University of Maryland’s online institutional repository. As the administrators of the policy, the Libraries provide tools for advocating with their publishers to comply, including the Author Addendum and technical infrastructure, in the form of our institutional repository, DRUM, to host published research, data, and other supplemental materials.
Data Sharing and Publication
One of the most significant changes to public access requirements is the inclusion of data in the scope of research outputs that must be made openly available. In order to support these new rules, the Libraries have begun to invest in open data infrastructure and repositories, including the generalist repositories Dryad and Qualitative Data Repositories.
The Libraries are offering services related to open data, including online resources and consultations. The Libraries Open Scholarship Services and GIS and Data Services teams can help you to identify an appropriate publication or repository for your data as early as the grant application stage. Consultations can also help to refer you to campus services to manage and store active data and to access data management planning tools and services. Having strong, well-constructed plans regarding your data management and publication will ensure that applications now and in the future to federal research funders are ready to compete under the terms of the new mandate. Reach out to schedule a conversation with OSS (lib-open-scholarship@umd.edu) or GIS and Data Services.
Government Agency Public Access Policies
| Agency | Publication Guidelines | Data Guidelines | Resources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Administration for Community Living (ACL) | Final peer-reviewed accepted journal manuscript should be submitted to PubMed Central. | Data should be made freely available and publicly accessible at time of publication. | ACL Access Plan.pdf |
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) | Final peer-reviewed accepted journal manuscript should be submitted to PubMed Central. The published version is also acceptable, if permitted by the publisher. | A data management plan is required. The plan will be evaluated by AHRQ for merit. Sharing of data should be timely, with the specific time dictated by the nature of the data. | |
Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) | Final peer-reviewed manuscripts should be submitted to PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. | A data management plan is required. Data sets must be published in a recognized scientific data repository within 30 months of the data set’s creation. | ASPR Access Plan.pdf |
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) | Final peer-reviewed manuscript should be submitted to the National Institutes of Health Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS). The author must also submit the manuscript to PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. | A data management plan is required. See page 3 of the data policy for specific requirements. |
CDC Access Plan.pdf
CDC Data policy.pdf |
| Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) | Final peer-reviewed accepted journal manuscript should be submitted to PubMed Central. The published version is also acceptable, if permitted by the publisher. | A data management plan is required. Data will be made freely available and publicly accessible at the time of publication. | CMS Access Plan.pdf |
Department of Agriculture (USDA) | Final peer-reviewed manuscripts, or the published version if the publisher permits, should be submitted to PubAg archive within 12 months of publication. | A data management plan that focuses on digital data fundamental to the conclusions of peer-reviewed scientific research publications is required. | USDA Access Plan.pdf |
| Department of Defense (DOD) | Final peer-reviewed paper should be submitted to the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) for publication. Articles must be available no later than 12 months after publication. | Data management plan (DMP) required for proposal, as well as a deposit of datasets supporting public research results. | DOD Access Plan.pdf |
| Department of Education (DoED) | Final peer-reviewed manuscript should be made openly accessible within 12 months of publication. Authors may submit their manuscript to ERIC, if the publisher permits. | Data should be made accessible through the use of a data archive or other avenue that the investigator and institution are responsible for. | Department of Education Access Plan |
| Department of Energy (DOE) | Submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscript to an open access repository, UMD’s DRUM, or to the Department of Energy’s PAGES.
Metadata and a link to the text must be submitted to DOE’s Office of Scientific and Technical Education if the article is submitted to a repository. Alternatively, the article can be submitted directly to DOE through their e-link service. | A data management plan is required. |
DOE Access Plan.pdf
|
| Department of Homeland Security (DHS) | Final publication or peer-reviewed manuscript should be submitted to PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. | Data management plan required. Data should be submitted to a publicly accessible data repository. | DHS Access Plan.pdf |
| Department of Transportation (DOT) | When articles are accepted for publication, submit them to the National Transportation Library digital repository. Other written deliverables, such as final reports, must be submitted as well. Research project descriptions should be submitted to the Transportation Research Board’s Research in Progress database. | Data management plan required. The DMP should specifically focus on long-term preservation and access to digital data sets. The DMP must also indicate where the dataset will be deposited. Research project descriptions should be submitted to the Transportation Research Board’s Research in Progress database. | How to Comply with Data Submission DOT Public Access Plan.pdf |
| Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) | Peer-reviewed journal manuscripts should be submitted to PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication. | Data management plan required. DMP should focus on research data supporting peer reviewed publications. The data should be made available in a publicly accessible data repository within 30 days of submission to PubMed. Metadata must be registered by the researcher in the EPA’s Environmental Dataset Gateway. | EPA Access Plan.pdf |
| Food and Drug Administration (FDA) | Final peer-reviewed manuscript should be submitted to PubMed Central. The FDA utilizes the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS) as the mechanism for submission through PubMed Central. | Data should be deposited in an existing public data repository.
Alternative options are:
Submit supplemental information to the publishing journal. (Smaller datasets)
House the data on FDA web servers.
Make the data available upon request. | FDA Access Plan.pdf |
| Ford Foundation | All copyrightable products funded by the grant should be made freely available. These products include white pages, websites, and research reports, and should be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. | Data sets are included in “all copyrightable products” and should be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. | |
| Gates Foundation | Publications should be openly accessible in a repository immediately upon publication. Publications should be licensed under Creative Commons.
The Gates Foundation will pay “reasonable fees” to a publisher in order to meet open access publication requirements. | Data should be immediately accessible and open. | |
| National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) | Final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts, or final published version by publisher agreement, should be submitted to NASA PubSpace on the PubMed Central platform. Articles must be made available within 12 months of publication. | Data management plans that focus on research data that underlie the results and findings in peer-reviewed publications are required.
The data must be made available at the time of publication or within a reasonable time period. Data can be made available through NASA archives or another repository as supplementary material. | NASA Access Plan.pdf |
| National Institutes of Health (NIH) | Final peer-reviewed manuscripts must be openly accessible through PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. Authors should submit their work here. | Data management and sharing plans are required for all grants resulting in the generation of scientific data. Data should be shared as soon as possible following publication. | NIH Access Plan.pdf |
| National Institute of Justice (NIJ) | N/A | A data archiving plan is required. Data sets resulting from funded research archived with the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) and submitted 90 days before the end of the project period. | |
| National Endowment for the Humanities: Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) | N/A | A data management plan is required. | ODH website |
| National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) | Final peer-reviewed manuscript should be submitted to PubMed Central. The manuscript must be submitted once it is accepted for publication. NIST will also accept the published version, with publisher permission. | Funding recipient must send descriptive information about the data, including a link to the published data, to the Federal Program Officer or designee, who will enter it into NIST’s Enterprise Data Inventory Tool. The funding recipient is responsible for depositing the data in a publicly accessible repository. |
NIST Access Plan.pdf
NIST Data Sharing Information.pdf |
| National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) | Final peer-reviewed manuscripts should be submitted to NOAA’s Institutional Repository within 12 months of publication. | Data management plans focusing on environmental data collected during the course of funded research should be submitted.
Data sharing should be completed within two years and no later than the publication of a peer-reviewed article based on the data. Data should be submitted to the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information or to a publicly-accessible data repository. | NOAA's Access Plan |
| National Science Foundation (NSF) | Final peer-reviewed manuscripts of journal articles and juried conference papers should be submitted to the NSF Public Access Repository within 12 months of publication. | A data management plan focusing on primary data, samples, and other supporting materials is required. DMPs should be limited to two pages. See the NSF’s DMP guidelines. | NSF Access Plan.pdf |
| Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) | Final peer-reviewed manuscript should be submitted to the Defense Technical Information Center's repository (DTIC) within 12 months of publication. | Data management plan required. Data should be made available within 12 months of publication. | ODNI Access Plan.pdf |
| Smithsonian Institution | The Smithsonian’s plan applies only to work authored or co-authored by Smithsonian employees, academic appointees, or trust employees. | The Smithsonian’s plan applies only to work authored or co-authored by Smithsonian employees, academic appointees, or trust employees. | Smithsonian Access Plan.pdf |
| Social Security Administration (SSA) | Federally funded publications should be made freely accessible in a repository at the time of, or as close as possible, to publication. | Data management plan required. Data should be made freely available in a data repository at the time of publication. | SSA Access Plan.pdf |
| United States Agency for International Development (USAID) | N/A | Datasets should be submitted to the Development Data Library (DDL) in accordance with the terms and conditions of the award. If the dataset is submitted to a publicly accessible research database, submission to the DDL is not required. | USAID Access Plan.pdf |
| US Census Bureau | Final peer-reviewed manuscript should be submitted to the Census Bureau's publicly accessible repository at the time of publication. This repository is still under development. | Data management plan required. Data should be made available in a a publicly accessible data repository. | Census Access Plan DRAFT.pdf |
| US Geological Survey (USGS) | Final peer-reviewed accepted manuscripts, or the published version, should be made openly accessible via USGS’ archive or the publisher’s website within 12 months of publication. | A data management plan that focuses on digital data required to validate research finding resulting from complete or partial USGS funding is required.
Data should be made available at the time of publication through the appropriate USGS data repository or a third-party repository. The authoritative version of the data is maintained by the USGS.
The metadata associated with the data must be indexed in the USGS Science Data Catalog. | USGS Access Plan.pdf |
Veterans Affairs | Final manuscripts should be submitted to PubMed Central. | N/A | VA Access Plan.pdf |