Serials Review

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Public Access to Federally Funded Research

Chris Bulock

To cite this article: Chris Bulock (2023) Public Access to Federally Funded Research, Serials
Review, 49:1-2, 51-53, DOI: 10.1080/00987913.2023.2174399
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2023.2174399

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Published online: 05 Jun 2023.

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SERIALS REVIEW
2023, VOL. 49, NOS. 1–2, 51–53
https://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2023.2174399

OPEN DIALOG: CHRIS BULOCK, COLUMN EDITOR

Public Access to Federally Funded Research

Chris Bulock
University Library, California State University Northridge, Northridge, California, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a new memo requiring all OSTP; OA mandates; funder
federal agencies that fund research provide immediate public access to resulting research mandates; research data
data and scholarly publications. This new memo removes the option of a 12 months
embargo, and it extends the requirement agencies with less than $100 million in annual
research and development expenditures. This column investigates the possible impacts of
the broader policy, including introducing the public access requirement to new agencies
and academic disciplines, and how a repository approach to public access might intersect
with publisher provided open access.

Introduction rather than allowing for a 12-month embargo. The

Since 2013, policies governing public access to federally
funded research output have been shaped by a memo
issued by the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy (OSTP). That memo required “each
Federal agency with over $100 million in annual con-
duct of research and development expenditures to
develop a plan to support increased public access to the
results of research funded by the Federal Government”
(Holdren, 2013, p. 2). While that memo and the policies
created to comply with it have had a great impact on
public access to research, there has also been no short-
age of change and development in scholarly publishing
in the intervening years. In order to continue to advance
the goal of public access to federally funded research, in
August of 2022, the OSTP released a new memo that
significantly builds upon the earlier one (Nelson, 2022).
In this piece I will refer to the 2022 memo as the
Nelson memo, as it was written by Alondra Nelson of
the OSTP and will refer to the 2013 memo written by
John P. Holdren as the Holdren memo.
The Nelson memo expands on the requirements of
the Holdren memo in some key ways. First, it extends
the requirement for a public access policy to all fed-
eral agencies that fund research, not just those with
over $100 million in such funding. Second, it now
makes the requirement for public access immediate
new requirements do not take effect immediately.
Agencies are given until December 31, 2024 to publish
their plans and another full year after that for the
plans to take effect. While it is too early to know
exactly the effects that these new requirements will
have, this column will attempt to explore some of the
possible changes librarians and researchers may see as
a result of the Nelson memo.
A broader mandate
The Nelson memo includes an expansion from a sub-
set of federal agencies that fund research and develop-
ment to all such agencies. In some respects, the
impact of this expansion could be seen as fairly
minor. According to the Economic Landscape of
Federal Public Access Policy, a report issued by the
OSTP in 2022 in response to the Nelson memo, “Just
six federal agencies—the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF),
Department of Defense (DOD), Department of
Energy (DOE), Department of Agriculture (USDA),
and NASA—account for more than 94% of the
approximately $150 billion in funds obligated to fed-
eral research and development” (p. 11). While includ-
ing agencies with less than $100 million in research
and development funds will only provide public access

CONTACT Chris Bulock christopher.bulock@csun.edu University Library, California State University Northridge, 18111 Nordhoff St, Northridge, CA
91330, USA
ß 2023 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the
posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
52 OPEN DIALOG
to a small percentage of research output, it will bring
public access to new agencies, including some that
focus on disciplines outside of the science and tech-
nology fields associated with the large research agen-
cies mentioned above.
As an example, the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) will now be subject to the public
access requirement. A public access requirement for
publications resulting from NEH-funded research
could bring challenges for the agency, as well as the
authors and those helping them navigate the process.
One such challenge would be interpreting the memo,
which often seems to be written from a science and
technology perspective, for a very different set of dis-
ciplines. The memo emphasizes that it applies to peer
reviewed scholarly publications, including journal
articles and book chapters. Researched funded by the
NEH may result in a peer reviewed journal article, or
it may result in a monograph, a chapter, or a confer-
ence paper that does not go through peer review. It is
difficult to say how the agency might address this.
They could hold to the memo’s emphasis on peer
reviewed scholarship, which could lead to very differ-
ent levels of public access for projects funded by the
same grant program depending on the researcher’s
choice of how to disseminate the results of the funded
research. Or perhaps they could present a plan that is
broader in scope and requires public access for a
wider variety of scholarly products than the memo
stipulates. Agencies that focus on the humanities and
arts may also reach scholars that are less familiar with
OA publishing and data management plans, requiring
more support from librarians or research offices to
work through new federal requirements.
Green and gold
The Nelson memo states “that all peer-reviewed schol-
arly publications authored or coauthored by individuals
or institutions resulting from federally funded research
are made freely available and publicly accessible by
default in agency-designated repositories without any
embargo or delay after publication” (p. 3). This strong
emphasis on repositories seems on the surface like a
victory for Green OA advocates that prefer a path to
open publishing that favors freely accessible repositories
over publisher-provided Gold OA funded by APCs.
And there is already an excellent model for federal
agencies providing a robust repository in PubMed
Central, the OA repository of the NIH. The National
Library of Medicine describes PubMed Central as “a
repository for journal literature deposited by
participating publishers, as well as for author manu-
scripts that have been submitted in compliance with the
NIH Public Access Policy and similar policies of other
research funding agencies” (National Library of
Medicine [NLM], 2021). Full text files for deposited
articles are available directly in PMC, and the repository
is available as a full text collection in library discovery
indexes and link resolver knowledge bases.
However, the repositories hosted by some other
agencies look rather different. The Department of
Energy Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science
(DOE PAGES), for example, relies extensively on jour-
nal publishers to provide full text access to sponsored
projects. Instead of hosting full text files like PubMed
Central, DOE PAGES frequently includes links to the
publisher’s version of record. As a result, DOE PAGES
functions more like a pathway to Gold OA, relying on
publishers to host the content and provide public
access. Additionally, it isn’t integrated with library dis-
covery tools the way PubMed Central is. So, DOE
PAGES provides an example of a federal agency’s public
access repository that lends more strength to the Gold
rather than the Green OA approach. Federal agencies
that are new to the public access requirement may end
up with a variety of approaches to their designated
repositories, but there seems to be precedent both for
repositories that provide direct access to full text articles
and those that rely on publisher access.
Conclusion
The Nelson memo seeks to provide public access to
research data and peer reviewed scholarship resulting
from federal research funding, immediately upon pub-
lication. While the goals are clearly spelled out, much
remains uncertain about the eventual implementation
of this policy guidance. New disciplines and agencies
are being brought into the public access requirement,
and they may different research and publication prac-
tices that require different implementation that what
was seen following the Holdren memo. In addition,
the agencies that had already implemented public
access policies often took diverging approaches to
meet the requirement, with some building robust OA
repositories and others relying on publishers to pro-
vide public access. Over the next few years, the pub-
lishing and implementation of new public access plans
is likely to affect many aspects of scholarly publishing.
ORCID
Chris Bulock http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6936-4000

References
Holdren, J. P. (2013). Memorandum for the heads of execu-
tive departments and agencies: Increasing access to the
results of federally funded scientific research. Office of
Science and Technology Policy. https://obamawhitehouse.
archives.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_
access_memo_2013.pdf
National Library of Medicine (NLM) (2021, October 13).
MEDLINE, PubMed, and PMC (PubMed Central): How
are they different? https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/differ-
ence.html
OPEN DIALOG 53
Nelson, A. (2022, August 25). Memorandum for the heads of
executive departments and agencies: Ensuring free, immedi-
ate, and equitable access to federally funded research. Office
of Science and Technology Policy. https://www.whitehouse.
gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-
Access-Memo.pdf
Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
(2022, August). Economic landscape of federal public
access policy. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/
uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-Access-Congress
ional-Report.pdf