Most governmental agencies that fund research require copies of the resulting reports or articles to be freely available to the public. This includes U.S. federal agencies, like DOE, NSF, or NIH, as well as European agencies. The rationale behind these mandates is that the taxpayers who fund the research should not have to pay again to see the results. It is also hoped that making the results of government funded research transparent will have the effect of increasing public confidence in the research enterprise.
In January 2023, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued new guidance to all federal agencies that fund research, charging them to develop policies for public access to the results of research they fund. These policies will not take effect for several months or up to a year. In the meantime, existing policies will remain in force.
OSTP published a fact sheet to help researchers and others understand the new guidance. It can be found at https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2023/01/11/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-new-actions-to-advance-open-and-equitable-research/.
As with public access, most funding agencies require open data or data sharing. Those that don’t typically require at least a data management plan. These mandates usually apply only to scientific data and explicitly exclude personally identifiable information. Unlike the policies on research papers, open data policies typically identify pre-approved repositories and sometimes require that specific repositories must be used.
Because of the new OSTP directive, various agencies will be updating their polices at irregular intervals over the next year or so. Because of this, the best resource for discovering what the current requirements are for each funding agency is to use one of the resources listed below.
Who controls the copyright to your work? Many commercial publishers require you to sign over copyright to them. This means that you no longer have control over the use of your own work--you can't reuse or share that paper, for example in ResearchGate, and you can't deposit it in an institutional repository. Some publishers even restrict the use of preprint servers. This becomes very important if your funder requires the paper to be deposited or otherwise be made freely available either immediately or after an embargo period. If you're not sure about the copyright regulations of your publisher, the SHERPA/RoMEO project provides a searchable lists of publishers' copyright and open access policies.
This guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
