Open Research Funders Group Applauds Bold OSTP Action
The Open Research Funders Group wholeheartedly supports the recently issued memorandum on Increasing Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research Results. The revised guidance aligns effectively with the mission of the Open Research Funders Group. Since our inception in 2016, the ORFG has served as philanthropies’ voice in efforts to make funded research more equitable, accessible, transparent, replicable, and trustworthy. Like the federal government, our members are investing in research that tackles big societal challenges, in service of building a better future. Openness is essential to these efforts. It is a lever to widen the circle of scholarship, bring more voices to the conversation, advance equity, improve public confidence in policymaking, strengthen scientific integrity, accelerate the pace of research, and take advantage of advances in computing, data science, and AI in a way that closed science demonstrably cannot.
The new policy guidance advances previous federal policy in a number of impactful ways:
Immediate Access: The new guidance removes the previous 12-month embargo period on article sharing, and directs federal agencies to develop policies that would require access to publications “without any embargo or delay”. As the guidance affirms, such timely sharing is key to enabling the goals of open access, including accelerated scientific discovery. Importantly, the guidance would not require authors to publish in fully open access journals that may incur costs, but instead encourages sharing through “agency-designated repositories”.
Data Sharing: Similar to the above, the guidance directs federal agencies to update their policies on data sharing to enable immediate access to the data underlying published studies. In addition, it encourages agencies to think more expansively and “develop approaches and timelines” for the sharing of data not associated with publications. These are crucial steps for improving the verifiability, integrity, and reproducibility of federally funded research.
Broader Focus: The definition of ‘publications’ is expanded to potentially cover not just journal articles, but also peer-reviewed book chapters, editorials, and conference proceedings. This represents an important recognition of the diversity of research outputs, especially across different disciplines, and could help incentivize broader scholarly communication.
Equity Language: Centering equity as a guiding principle will encourage agencies to think about ways they can increase access to research without unintentionally raising additional barriers. Specifically, the guidance asks agencies to include in their plans, “How to maximize equitable reach of public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications” and to further “consider measures to reduce inequities in publishing of, and access to, federally funded research and data, especially among individuals from underserved backgrounds and those who are early in their careers”. This perspective aligns well with the ORFG’s Open & Equitable Model Funding Program.
Research Reusability: The guidance emphasizes the need for publications to be shared in both machine-readable formats and under terms that allow for “use and re-use rights”. The guidance also asks agencies to develop strategies to make “data, and other such research outputs and their metadata are findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable” (i.e., FAIR). This would permit researchers, citizen scientists, or industries to build on these shared outputs, as well as take advantage of emerging technologies, like content mining and artificial intelligence, to generate new knowledge.
Metadata and PIDs: The guidance calls for agencies to share publication metadata, including funding information, and to require the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs). Both of these points align well with the recommendations outlined by the ORFG’s Compliance & Output Tracking Working Group in our recent open letter, as part of our efforts to improve research output tracking.
Timeliness: The guidance outlines a promising timeline that both requires agencies to update their policy plans relatively quickly but also gives them ample time to roll out the changes. Larger agencies are asked to update their policy plans within six months, publish the plans by the end of 2024, and then enact the new policy within one year (by end of 2025). Smaller agencies not subject to the 2013 memo will have a year to devise their initial plans.This timeline highlights the growing need to increase access to research sooner rather than later, especially in response to emerging global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.
Comprehensive Coverage: Whereas the previous policy applied only to federal agencies with $100M+ in R&D expenditures, the new guidance applies to all U.S. federal agencies and departments – a jump from 20 to over 400 federal bodies. This will dramatically increase policy reach, and eventually the volume of research openly accessible and reusable.
The OSTP memorandum represents an exciting new chapter in U.S. federal open access policy, and again demonstrates the growing momentum in support of research sharing. The results of this revised guidance will have tangible benefits for the public. The Open Research Funders Group commends the OSTP for its leadership, which will accelerate progress toward curing disease and tackling climate change, facilitate more informed decision making between patients and doctors, and help to create a more durable bond between science and society.