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White House Moves to Improve Public Access to Scientific Research
A recent Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum instructs major federal research agencies to provide open access to federally funded research and digital scientific data. All federal agencies with an extramural research budget that exceeds $100 million will participate, following the example of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which implemented a similar policy in 2008. Over the next six months, these agencies will draft plans to ensure that any results of federal research published in peer-reviewed scholarly publications are available to the public. Depending on implementation, open access could lower overhead costs for research projects, accelerate scientific discovery and create new opportunities for entrepreneurs who organize, analyze and curate large data sets.
Open access to publically-funded research has become a renewed topic of debate over the past few months. In late December 2012, the Research Works Act was introduced in Congress that would have ended government mandates on private sector scholarly publishing. Publishing companies supported the act, since it would have prevented federal agencies from making research that appeared in academic journals available for free. The legislation would have put an end to the NIH requirement that all agency-funded research that appears in a final, peer-reviewed form be submitted within 12 months to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central, a free, full-text archive.
In response, open access advocates pushed for the introduction of the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would have mandated an open access policy similar to the one eventually released by OSTP. The Research Works Act, along with the prosecution and suicide of open-access advocate Aaron Schwarz, also prompted the open access community to petition the White House for greater access to taxpayer-funded data and research.
Last week, the White House responded to the debate by issuing a directive to major research agencies to design their own plans to ensure that the public has access to federally-funded research and data. OSTP Director John Holdren suggested that agency policies provide a 12-month embargo period, during which peer-reviewed articles would appear only in scientific publications. After that period, which would be subject to petition for change in the embargo duration, research would become available through open databases.
All federal agencies that finance more than $100 million in annual research must submit a plan to increase public access within six months. OSTP suggests that agencies combine their efforts to streamline bureaucracy and the number of eventual databases. Since no funding is being provided at the present time to implement this effort, the plans also will have to include a process to make past and future research available using only currently available resources.
By increasing access to previously walled-off research, the administration's directive could boost innovation in a number of ways. The eventual databases could make it easier to find relevant research and R&D partners. Private journals and databases are often expensive to access, and often come at a high cost to universities and research institutions. Small-scale R&D labs and companies may lack the funds to purchase these subscriptions. The new, free databases would connect these researchers with new information. The OSTP memo also includes the explicit notice that these agency plans should seek to create "innovative economic markets for services related to curation, preservation analysis and visualization." This mission could open up a number of entrepreneurial opportunities for information technology firms.