Interagency Public Access Coordination: A Report to Congress on the Coordination of Policies Related to the Dissemination and Long-Term Stewardship of the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research

Use the link above to access the full text of the report. The introduction to the report reads as follows: “The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (ACRA; Public Law 111-358), signed into law by President Obama in 2011, calls for the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to establish a working group under the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) with the responsibility to coordinate Federal science agency research and policies related to the dissemination and long-term stewardship of the results of unclassified research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications, supported wholly or in part by funding from the Federal science agencies. This report to Congress—submitted in fulfillment of Section 103 of ACRA (Appendix VI of this document)—details progress toward the coordination of policies related to these goals. The Administration has long recognized the importance of improving the management of and access to the results of federally funded scientific research including digital data and peer-reviewed publications. Since 2008, OSTP has been working to coordinate with agencies to develop policies that assure widespread public access to and long-term stewardship of the results of federally funded unclassified research. In 2009, the Interagency Working Group on Digital Data (IWGDD) under the NSTC Committee on Science (CoS) issued a report, entitled Harnessing the Power of Digital Data for Science and Society, which called for improved management of digital data resulting from federally funded research to better leverage taxpayer investment in scientific research and development. That same year, OSTP issued an initial Request for Information (RFI) on access to scholarly publications resulting from research conducted with Federal funding to explore the need for and potential methods for increasing access to peer-reviewed scientific publications describing the results of federally funded research. That RFI showed broad support for increasing public access to scientific publications but disagreement on how best to achieve increased access.”