Ask the Chefs: Making Sense of Changing US Policies - The Scholarly Kitchen

"The ascendancy of a Republican president, in itself, has cast a shadow of uncertainty over the fate of the Nelson Memo (no longer available at the White House website, but archived here), which requires that articles and data resulting from federally funded research be made publicly available immediately upon publication. Would the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in a Republican White House have the same enthusiasm for public access to the results of publicly-funded research as it did under the Obama and Biden administrations? If not, would the new leadership care enough about the issue to rescind or rewrite the current version of the memo? (Remember: the Nelson Memo is itself a rewrite of the Obama-era Holdren Memo.) Amid the chaos of firings, program shutdowns, and communication blackouts imposed by the Trump administration as soon as he took office, the current vibe does not seem propitious. But it’s still too soon, and this president’s style is too chaotic, for the tea leaves to be telling us anything very clear yet. On the one hand, it seems vanishingly unlikely that if it were starting from scratch, a Trump OSTP would issue anything like the Holdren or Nelson Memos. But it’s not starting from scratch, and the Nelson Memo has already been issued and had a significant (though not yet comprehensive) impact on funder requirements. Even assuming that public-access guidance isn’t to Trump’s liking, how likely is it that this particular item will become a significant blip on his administration’s radar in the foreseeable future?

One thing we do know: the identity of the person Trump has nominated to lead his OSTP. It’s his former technology staffer Michael Kratsios, who will reportedly work alongside computer scientist Lynn Parker under the leadership of venture capitalist David Sacks, whom Trump has appointed as his AI and Crypto Czar. Kratsios has worked in the past as chief of staff for Peter Thiel, the noted libertarian activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Does any of this help us read the future of public access to federally-funded research results? I’m not sure. For one thing, this OSTP will clearly be focusing tightly on issues related to AI; there’s a good chance that questions about whether and how the public can read scientific publications will seem to them like a distraction from bigger things. On the other hand, this president’s appetite for dismantling the policies of his liberal predecessors seems to be bottomless, and rescission of the Nelson Memo would take little more than the stroke of his big black Sharpie. On the other other hand, an OSTP leadership with a strongly libertarian bent might like the idea of empowering citizens with scientific knowledge – or hate the idea of telling researchers how to publish. I hate to lapse into journalistic “remains to be seen” boilerplate language, but… any number of things could happen with this new administration. What Trump’s particular set of loves, aversions, and obsessions will lead to in the case of public access remains to be seen...."