Librarians Leap to the Aid of Researchers Whose Funding Will Soon Depend on Open Access

"As more federal agencies begin requiring grant recipients to make research results freely available to the public, college librarians have taken on a new role: helping researchers comply with open-access rules.

A February 2013 memorandum from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said federal agencies with more than $100 million in research-and-development expenditures would have to require that results be available within a year of publication.

New open-access rules will take effect in October at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, among other agencies. Researchers will risk losing grant support from those sources if they don’t make their findings freely available to the public. Several private funders, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are also shifting to public-access requirements. In response, many college libraries are working with institutional research offices and others to let researchers know what’s expected of them...."