August 2024
On August 19, AERA submitted comments in response to a Request for Information on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Draft Public Access Policy and two sets of draft supplemental guidance. Like other federal agencies, NIH is currently in the process of updating its public access policy to align with the 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research.”
The draft NIH Public Access Policy focuses on making NIH-funded peer-reviewed scholarly publications available at the time of publication, with two supplemental guidance documents for Government Use License and Rights and Publication Costs. The draft policy would require the submission of NIH-funded peer-reviewed scholarly publications to the NIH publication database PubMed Central upon acceptance, for availability upon publication; an acknowledgment of federal funding in the manuscript; and provision of an NIH a license for government use. The policy also allows for publication-related costs to be included in the budget as direct or indirect costs, except for any that apply to the submission of an NIH-funded accepted manuscript to PubMed Central.
In a letter advanced by AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine, she underscored that AERA was generally supportive of the NIH public access policy.
“AERA supports the ongoing work to update the NIH public access policy for publications to remove the embargo period to make NIH-funded publications available to align with the 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum, Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” wrote Levine.
AERA has had a longstanding commitment to access to data and to publications to advance research and support an equity agenda. AERA’s comments offered important guidance on how to do so in a way that is truly equitable to researchers and to scholarly and scientific societies as publishers.
Points in the AERA comments included calling for measures to ensure alignment with the public access policies of peer federal research agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Also, the comments recommended a requirement of a direct object identifier (DOI number) for publications and encouragement of NIH-funded authors to obtain a persistent author identifier. In addition, the comments encouraged NIH to partner with publishers to decrease the burden on NIH-funded grantees of compliance with the public access policy and for costs to be allowable for article processing fees for submission to open access journals and to enable open access to publications.
AERA has engaged with federal agencies as they implement the provisions of the 2022 OSTP memo on public access. Earlier this year, AERA provided comments on the NSF Public Access Plan 2.0 and comments on the proposed revisions to the Education Department General Administrative Regulations and Related Regulatory Provisions. All federal agencies are expected to have final public access policies in place for grantees to make freely and publicly available peer-reviewed publications and their underlying data, effective no later than December 31, 2025.
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