What is the Public Access Policy?

 On August 25, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) updated its U.S. public access policy guidance  “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” to make the results of taxpayer-supported research immediately available to the American public at no cost. The update expanded upon OSTP’s 2013 guidance to federal agencies eliminating embargoes on publicly available federally funded research among other changes.

All federal agencies with research and development expenditures are subject to this guidance.

OSTP expects agency policies for increasing public access to scholarly publications and scientific data to be publicly posted by December 31, 2024, and to go into effect by December 31, 2025.

Agencies are expected to update and post their public access policies by December 31, 2026, with additional provisions related to supporting research and scientific integrity.

Government Use License (aka Federal Purpose License)

Grant recipients, or a subrecipient, generally retain copyright of their work, but must grant the federal agency this non-exclusive right as part of the grant agreement. Under this license (2 CFR 200.315), the "Federal agency reserves a royalty-free, nonexclusive, and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work for Federal purposes and to authorize others to do so. This includes the right to require recipients and subrecipients to make such works available through agency-designated public access repositories." 

NIH Update: "NIH’s default position is maximum transparency regarding research and research findings. This Notice updates the Effective Date of the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy, NOT-OD-25-047, to July 1, 2025 at which time it will replace the 2008 Public Access Policy. All other aspects of the Policy remain the same. The Policy will continue to apply to any Author Accepted Manuscript accepted for publication in a journal that is the result of funding by NIH in whole or in part through a grant or cooperative agreement, including training grants, a contract, an Other Transaction, NIH intramural research, or the official work of an NIH employee. Author Accepted Manuscripts meeting this qualification and with acceptance dates on or after July 1, 2025, are subject to the Policy."

2022 OSTP Public Access Memo Guidance: To aid in interpreting and comparing agency public access policies, SPARC developed a Publication and Data Sharing Requirements by Federal Agency (link below) resource that breaks down agency requirements under different sections. This page complements that resource to quickly surface agency policy implementation status and key information. 

Below are some more resources for helping you through the complex and evolving process:

If your work was supported by a federal grant, to meet compliance authors will need to retain the right to make a version of their work publicly available.

• If you publish open access you will be in compliance.
• Smith Faculty's Open Access Policy gives a "grant of right"  to make the article available to scholars and the public under the Creative Commons CC BY License, which is the most permissive of the Creative Commons licenses (ScholarWorks can accommodate making an article available under a more restrictive CC license if necessary). By submitting your accepted manuscript to ScholarWorks your work will be in compliance unless your funder requires deposit in a subject-specific repository, such as PubMed for NIH grants. Either way, your accepted manuscript can and should be included in ScholarWorks (LOCKSS Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe ).