PHG Foundation | White House issues public access directive for US research

"The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) last week released its public access policy directive intended to ensure that all federally funded research becomes available to the public after publication.  The directive requires federal agencies to make research papers accessible online without charge, within a timeframe appropriate to the type of research, but using a guideline of within a year of initial publication. Until now this policy has applied only to biomedical research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under their 2008 open access policy (seeprevious news).

All agencies that spend over $100 million annually on research have been instructed to produce a draft plan within 6 months addressing several specific points, including facilitating access to digital data and exploring ways to optimise archiving and searching.  The National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds all non-medical fields of scientific research in the US, has expressed support for the policy, but has not yet decided how to implement compliance. Myron Gutmann of the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences said different divisions are 'experimenting with things'.  The directive seems to have been welcomed by open access advocates and publishers alike. The Association of American Publishers described it as 'a reasonable, balanced resolution of issues', highlighting its emphasis on working with publishers to find acceptable solutions, the flexible one year embargo guideline, and its suggestion that agencies might link to a paper on the publisher’s website rather than in a central open access repository, allowing them to potentially continue to realise revenue from the resource via advertising.  This approach diverges from the UK model, where funders have policies stipulating that researchers submit their work to full open access pay-to-publish journals, and/or make papers available in a central repository following a 6 month embargo period (see previous news). Implementation here has not been smooth though: this week the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee criticised Research Councils UK(RCUK) for failing to adequately communicate its policy to researchers and other stakeholders, saying 'The government and RCUK must take immediate action to address specific concerns about RCUK’s open access policy'."