Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research: First Impressions on the US Government’s Policy | The Scholarly Kitchen

"The long-awaited and much-anticipated White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) guidelines for 'Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research' were released last Friday. The policy has been met with appreciation and approval from a wide range of stakeholders, ranging from open access (OA) advocates to publishers. This is a fair and sustainable policy that offers much to the public good. The policy has a lengthy history. It was an early priority for the Obama administration and they performed a round of public consultation to inform their policy in 2009. Congress added process requirements with the America COMPETES Act Reauthorization of 2010, which included a second round of public consultation, done in 2011. A recent 'We The People' petition was a key factor in raising the profile and driving approval of this policy for the administration. The petition, led by a team of advocates, an academic, and a leading publisher, is a great example of how powerful collaboration can be. It is a sign of the maturation of OA as a social movement — a shift from angry confrontation and rhetoric to seeking common ground and working toward effective, real-world change. The policy focuses on two distinct areas — access to the papers published as a result of federally funded research, and access to the data produced by such projects. Guidelines are presented, and each US science funding agency with 'over $100 million in annual conduct of research and development expenditures' is required to develop a plan within the next six months. To my knowledge, the agencies covered are the following: NIH, CDC, FDA, ARHQ, NSF, NASA, DOE, USDA, FAA, FHWA, NIST, NOAA, USGS, EPA, DOD, VA, USAID, Dept. of Education, and the Smithsonian (please chime in below if I missed any). It’s impossible to know yet how each agency will set policy, but there are some fairly clear messages being sent. It is evident that the OSTP has their priorities in the right place and recognizes that access to and reuse of the data generated by federally funded research is of greater importance than reuse of published papers. Textmining applied to the reports written about research may indeed have potential, but that potential likely pales in comparison to developments coming from the actual results of the research. Data access and reuse, however, are limited by intellectual property (IP) law, particularly the Bayh-Dole Act. The data guidelines specifically note that any policy must recognize IP rights and avoid any negative impact on them. As such, any requirements may be essentially toothless, if researchers decide to exercise their IP rights and patent their results. Really, this is more a question for the researchers themselves to answer — whether they’re willing to sacrifice personal and institutional gain in favor of more rapid progress. Leaving aside the implications for data access and reuse, here are some first impressions on the guidelines for public access to funded research papers (as always, with the caveat that I am neither a lawyer nor a legislator) ..."