HHS Releases Comprehensive Plans to Provide Public Access to Research Outputs | SPARC

"In response to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) directive issued in February 2013, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Friday released a comprehensive set of plans outlining the steps that its five largest agencies will take to create policies expanding public access to the results of their funded research.  The policies are expected to go into effect by the end of this year. The HHS release includes plans to update existing policies at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as plans for new policies at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).  Additionally, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) is also voluntarily developing a plan for its portfolio of funded research. There is a lot of information packed into this single release.  Fortunately, while each of the five agencies released separate plans, HHS first constructed a common set of guiding principles on which to base those plans, in order to provide continuity and minimize the complexity of the compliance burden on funded researchers.  This document serves as a useful 'meta plan' document, and is a good starting point for drilling down into individual elements of each Agency’s proposed implementations ..."