August 25, 2022: Memorandum "Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research"
The White House released a memorandum from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) that updates the 2013 OSTP Memorandum requiring that federally funded research be openly available. Changes and additions to the earlier memorandum include:
- All federally funded research will be immediately available to the public -- 2013 memo allowed 12-month embargoes
- All federal agencies will comply -- 2013 memo only applied to agencies that fund more than $100 million in research
- Underlying research data will also be required to be open
- Persistent identifiers will be needed for all research outputs (eg, DOIs) and for individual researchers (eg, ORCiD) -- these are also part of the recently released NSPM-33 (National Security Presidential Memo 33) Requirements
This is great news for libraries, including the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) who enthusiastically welcomed the news, calling it "a historic moment for scientific communications .... Equitable and enduring access to information is the mission of research libraries and, collectively, we applaud the OSTP's update to make research immediately accessible."
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition) has put together a Fact Sheet for clarification.
As a reminder, ODU's institutional repository, ODU Digital Commons, is an open-access repository where any research reports, publications and data can be made available with DOIs (as persistent identifiers). We also encourage faculty and researchers to obtain an ORCID, which is already a requirement for many publications and federally funded research.
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Contact: Karen Vaughan, kvaughan@odu.edu, Head of Scholarly Communication & Publishing, ODU Libraries