What Does “Federally Funded” Actually Mean? | The Scholarly Kitchen

"My years of avoiding all things Open Access (OA) are clearly over. We have been hearing about possible OA mandates for all federally funded papers for almost as long as we have been hearing that print “will be dead in 5 years”. Now that we are on the verge of a mandate and I have become our in-house expert on the topic, there is one detail that continues to confuse me. Under inevitable mandates, what constitutes a 'federally funded' paper? The OSTP public access memo does little to define what it would consider a federally funded paper. It does mention 'research that directly arises from Federal funds, as defined in relevant OMB circulars (e.g., A-21 and A-11).' I thought maybe those circulars would be helpful but I was wrong. One defines financial reporting for federal programs at universities and the other appears to be the actual federal budget. I turned to the NIH as the likely model for others.  Their OA mandate applies to the following manuscripts: [1] Any direct funding from an NIH grant or cooperative agreement [2] Any direct funding from an NIH contract [3] Any direct funding from the NIH Intramural Program Authored by an NIH employee [4] Authored by an NIH employee

Now we are getting somewhere ..."