February 2020

On February 19, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Subcommittee on Open Science issued a request for public comment in the Federal Register to seek recommendations on approaches for ensuring broad public access to the peer-reviewed scholarly publications, data, and code that result from federally funded scientific research. Comments are due March 16.

The effort builds on a 2013 memorandum from the OSTP requiring federal agencies with budgets greater than $100 million for research and development to implement policies to provide access to scientific publications resulting from federal research funding. Journal articles would be made available to the public 12 months after their publication date.

OSTP is seeking input on the following topics:

• Limitations on the release of publications, data, and code, and how public access can be accelerated while research quality is ensured
• How federal agencies can make publications and data from federal research funding available in a way that “minimizes delay, maximizes access, and enhances usability”
• How American science leadership and competitiveness benefit from immediate public access to publications and data from federal research funding

In December 2019, AERA joined with a group of 63 scholarly publishers on a letter responding to a potential executive order to eliminate the 12-month embargo period included in the 2013 OSTP memorandum. As reported in the December 2019 AERA Highlights, the aim of the letter was to defer shifting to a fully open access model without a period for designed consideration and discussion of various models and mechanisms for doing so and the cost implications of each.

As reported last month in AERA Highlights, the OSTP Subcommittee on Open Science is seeking input on the desirable characteristics of data repositories. Comments are due March 6.