Keeping Equity at the Forefront of OSTP's Policy Guidelines
On August 25, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) issued new policy guidance to increase access to federally funded research. This represents a substantial advancement for scientific and scholarly communication, as it holds great promise for accelerating the pace of discovery of the publicly funded scientific portfolio in the U.S. The guidance is significant across multiple dimensions, including the requirement to make papers and data freely available at the time of publication. Besides fostering research integrity and reproducibility, these policy guidelines can increase research collaboration more equitably, not only among those who can pay to access these resources. We have also witnessed similar policies addressing manuscripts and research data unintentionally exacerbate existing inequities in the system. To ensure inclusive researcher participation, the conditions necessary to implement the aforementioned policy guidelines must be intentionally outlined.
The distribution of federal research dollars is often not equitable. Funding success rates can be low for researchers of color, women, and early career applicants. Complying with data and output sharing expectations, such as creating data management plans, overseeing data curation, etc., represents additional responsibilities for research teams. Researchers traditionally more successful in securing grant funding or those with robust institutional support networks can better prepare research outputs for open dissemination than unfunded researchers or researchers at non-R1 institutions. Funding agencies can take significant steps to support researchers by making resources available within funded projects to build grantees' capacity for research output sharing and equip them with adequate guidance and tools to sort out these extra activities.
Within the Open & Equitable Model Funding Program, we have worked with philanthropic program officers, researchers, and community organizers to identify, a set of interventions research funders can implement to reduce inequities in publishing and to access scientific results among individuals from underserved backgrounds and those at early stages in their careers. A cohort of private research funders is already piloting significant modifications to their grantmaking practices based on these recommendations. Among the piloted interventions are how to reach out to and engage with these communities, create mutually beneficial relationships and long-term partnerships, and provide strategic support to level the playing field for underserved researchers, to name a few.
Research funders must work with the diverse academic communities they aim to serve to keep policies aligned with equity and inclusion goals. Experiences drawn from the Open & Equitable Model Funding Program can inform the implementation plans to be developed by the OSTP and other agencies. We are eager to discuss how our findings can assist federal funders in their efforts to materialize the policy guidance recently issued.