Remarks by Günter Waibel on federal public access policies and institutional investment - Office of Scholarly Communication

"My name is Günter Waibel, and I am the Executive Director of the California Digital Library at the UC Office of the President. I’ll focus my remarks on the implementation of the 2022 White House OSTP guidance by agencies, publishers and institutions.

For publishing, the OSTP guidance has two tracks.

• Track A is what we might call the mandatory green open access compliance track.
  • Compliance requires a deposit in an “agency-designated repositor[y] without any embargo or delay.”

• Track B is what we might call the entirely optional gold open access publishing track.
  • The memo states that agencies should “allow researchers to include reasonable publication costs […] in all research budgets.”

Both of these tracks potentially require different kinds of investments from institutions, their libraries and their authors. On both tracks, there are significant opportunities for federal agencies and publishers to create a more seamless and equitable experience....

In summary, my recommendations to federal agencies are:

1. Please invoke the federal purpose license in your public access plans to create legal clarity for authors.
2. Please work with publishers and institutions to develop a scalable path towards automating repository deposit and compliance. PIDs that are openly available, that meet best practices agreed upon by the research community, and that are designed for global adoption and interoperability offer a promising approach.
3. Please continue to ensure that grantees understand that grant funds are eligible for open access payments.

My recommendation in particular to large research institutions is:

1. You can stop double-payments to publishers out of your library funds and federal agency grant funds by negotiating open access agreements...."