In a Historic Win for Open Access, U.S. Publicly Funded Research will be Freely and Immediately Available to All - SPARC

"On August 25th, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued updated policy guidance making the results of U.S. taxpayer-funded research immediately and freely available to the public. For the first time, everyone – from scientists to students, physicians to entrepreneurs – will be able to access articles reporting on the more than $80 billion in scientific research that American taxpayers fund each year without delay. 

In a memorandum on “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” Dr. Alondra Nelson, the head of OSTP, released guidance to federal agencies to update their public access policies to make all research publications, along with the data needed to validate their conclusions, immediately available to the public, no later than December 31, 2025.

This historic step is the result of nearly two decades of steady policy progress towards making “open” the default mode for sharing research outputs in the U.S. What began as a request from a single agency (the National Institutes of Health) to researchers to voluntarily make their articles publicly available in 2005, advanced year after year, consistently growing in scope and coverage. Each step – from the 2008 Congressional mandate to NIH to make their voluntary policy mandatory, to the expansion of that mandate to all federal science agencies through the Obama Administration’s Holdren Memorandum in 2013 – reflected the growing will of the research community to embrace digital communication channels in order to more quickly and widely share the results of their work, and to build on the work of others.  ..."