The Grand Compromise of U.S. Public Access Programs: Going Green – satPRnews

"We at the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) have found that providing full public access to the research DOE funds is simple in principle and complex in practice.  And reflecting on this 2012 editorial, we can say that a great deal of progress has been made toward reaching the goal of free public access it sets out.  And much of that progress is due to hard collaborative work by both the government and publishers. 

Following the February 2013 memo from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on 'Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,' all major U.S. federal science agencies are now implementing public access plans, which comprehend both publications and data.

DOE was the first federal agency to gain OSTP approval of its plan – in July 2014.  DOE’s early implementation is a result of the longstanding scientific and technical information (STI) program and infrastructure managed by OSTI since the days of the Atomic Energy Commission.  OSTI has systems in place for providing public access to over 40,000 research items per year resulting from DOE’s $11 billion research and development (R&D) budget.  Such outputs include technical reports, conference papers, and patents, as well as metadata for journal articles and datasets.  With this infrastructure in place, implementing public access to the full text of journal articles (or the accepted manuscripts) was an incremental, not a revolutionary change.  After a 12-month embargo period, or as we like to call it, 'administrative interval,' the accepted manuscripts are made freely available through the OSTI-hosted DOE Public Access Gateway for Energy and ScienceBeta, or DOE PAGESBeta.

OSTP encouraged agencies to work together and also to engage in public-private collaboration.  DOE does both.  OSTI partnered with the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense, who wished to deploy PAGES-like features in their public access solutions.  Combined, the three agencies’ research funding results in roughly 80,000 journal articles per year, or nearly half the output of the entire U.S. government’s research investments.  As a complement to the key feature of authors submitting accepted manuscripts, these agencies are also taking advantage of the public access contributions of publishers.  Through the publisher consortium CHORUS – the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States, these agencies receive metadata for full-text publications and provide direct links to publisher websites as part of their public access search results.

DOE PAGESBeta employs both centralized and decentralized components.  Metadata is centralized, but much of the full-text content is reached by links to institutional repositories and to publisher websites.  OSTI maintains a dark archive of full text in the event content becomes inaccessible elsewhere.  This hybrid model suits DOE because it’s the same model OSTI has been successfully using for other kinds of STI from DOE lab researchers and grantees."