Public Access to Scientific Publications Resulting from Federally Funded R&D

"While there is general support for ensuring that unclassified basic and applied R&D is widely available for use by the public, the scientific community, and industry, the 12-month embargo period has been an area of contention. Critics of the embargo period argue that it requires American taxpayers to pay twice— once to fund the conduct of research and then again to view the results, which are often behind scientific journal subscription paywalls. Some commercial and nonprofit scientific society publishers argue, however, that the embargo period is critical to ensure the generation of subscription revenues that support editing and production costs. They also argue that immediate public access would “effectively nationalize the valuable American intellectual property that we produce [i.e., copyrighted journal articles] and force us to give it away to the rest of the world for free.” In 2020, national governments, the scientific community, publishers, and nonprofit organizations came together to provide immediate access to the results of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) R&D to aid in the global response to the pandemic. Free and immediate access to scientific results, publications, and data is considered central to the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and testing. Citing, in part, the benefits of immediate public access to COVID-19 research, in August 2022, OSTP issued a memorandum that directs all federal agencies to develop a new, or update an existing, public access plan with new requirements. First, the memorandum requires scientific publications resulting from federally funded R&D to be publicly accessible immediately upon publication without an embargo or delay. The memorandum also requires that scientific data underlying such publications be made freely available and publicly accessible at the time of publication. In addition, the memorandum directs federal agencies to develop approaches and timelines for sharing federally funded scientific data not associated with publicly accessible scientific publications. Federal agency public access plans must be implemented by December 31, 2025...."