By Rachel Magee
Embargoes on free access to publications from federally funded research to be dropped
The US government is introducing a requirement to its open-access policy for all federally funded research results to be made immediately available, in what has been described as a ‘game-changer’ for scholarly publishing.
In a 25 August memorandum, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) said that, under changes to be implemented by the end of 2025, federally funded research should no longer be published with a 12-month embargo on free open access. The embargo was an option in its previous policy guidance on public access to research.
In the memorandum, Alondra Nelson, a deputy director at OSTP and deputy assistant to the president, said this optional embargo had limited immediate access of federally funded research results to only those who could pay for it or who had access through libraries or other institutions.
“Financial means and privileged access must never be the pre-requisites to realising the benefits of federally funded research that the American public deserves,” Nelson said in the policy guidance document. She added there should be “no delay” between taxpayers and the returns on their investment in research.
Under the new policy guidance, federal agencies that fund R&D have been called on to update or develop new public access plans to ensure all federally funded peer-reviewed publications are made accessible in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.
Policy could ‘level the playing field’
To build on data-sharing measures from the previous policy in 2013, OSTP said data published in peer-reviewed research articles should be made immediately available upon publication.
OSTP said public access to federally funded research data would help “level the playing field across a highly uneven funding landscape between academic disciplines”.
The memorandum to the heads of executive departments and agencies that fund R&D said these updates should happen “as soon as possible” and no later than 31 December 2025.
‘Game changer’
Johan Rooryck, executive director of Coalition S, a group of mainly European funders calling for immediate open access, said the new policy guidance from the US is a “game-changer for scholarly publishing.”
“Such a strong statement, from a country that is leading in many research areas, will greatly advance efforts for global open access“, Rooryck added.
White House directs health, science agencies to make federally funded studies free to access
The White House on Thursday directed health and science agencies to make federally funded studies immediately available to the public after publication, a move that open-access advocates have long pressed for but one that threatens to upend the business models of scientific journals.
The guidance from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy effectively ushers in a sea change in the publishing industry, which currently places many federally funded research papers behind a paywall for 12 months.
While President Biden — and former President Trump before him — had long pledged to open access to federally funded research, the publishing lobby has argued doing so could spell the demise of scientific journals reliant on significant subscription fees to access embargoed papers.
“It is a transformational document,” said Center for Open Science Director Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist who helms the progressive open data nonprofit. “This is going to change how it is that science is communicated, and what the public and particularly other researchers have access to in the work that was done.
“The devil’s in the details,” said New England Journal of Medicine Editor-in-Chief Eric Rubin, who told STAT at least a third of the journal’s estimated 200 articles a year are attached to federal funding, though other funding streams do require open access. “It does threaten the model of a carefully thought-out presentation and carefully getting research. We’re gonna have to think about how we can still do what we think is important.”
Scientific organizations argue that the policy shift will primarily hit nonprofit journals and smaller research labs that won’t have the funds to put up article processing charges that can total more than $10,000 for more prominent publications.
Those processing costs could soar as journals change their revenue models to account for lagging subscriptions, said Michael Stebbins, a former Obama OSTP official and geneticist with Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science who led an Obama effort to boost public access.
“What you’re going to see is a massive drop in revenue for these scientific societies. That is going to crush some of them,” said Stebbins. “You could wind up creating some inequality within the scientific community in exchange for making the papers much more broadly available.”
However, Stebbins said he largely supports the initiative, particularly the move to make researchers’ data more quickly available in a bid to boost accountability. The challenge, he said, is projecting the federal costs of shifting research journals’ revenue model and creating open data infrastructures.
“This memo functionally drives agencies to spend money on the development of the policies and infrastructure necessary to implement the data requirements,” he said. “That’s where the big unknown is here. “
An OSTP spokesperson said the office has conducted dozens of meetings that “included large and small publishers, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, scholarly societies, libraries and universities, and the general public.”
“The topics discussed range from public access to open science to scientific integrity,” the spokesperson added.
In announcing the move, OSTP Director Alondra Nelson pointed to the Covid-19 pandemic, saying in a memo to federal agencies that “in the wake of the public health crisis, government, industry, and scientists voluntarily worked together to adopt an immediate public access policy, which yielded powerful results: research and data flowed effectively, new accessible insights super-charged the rate of discovery, and translation of science soared.”
Reports in 2019 that Trump’s science office was considering open access prompted publishing groups and business lobbies led by the American Association of Publishers to argue in a letter that the shift “would effectively nationalize the valuable American intellectual property that we produce and force us to give it away to the rest of the world for free.”
The letter, signed by more than 135 research and disease advocacy groups, made the case that an open-access policy would cost the U.S. government more money because it would need to underwrite increased fees for researchers looking to publish their studies.
On top of that, “it could also result in some scientific societies being forced to close their doors or to no longer be able to support the publication of U.S.-sponsored science that is key to ensuring that the U.S. remains the world leader in science and technology,” AAP and other organizations wrote.
In a statement Thursday, AAP suggested the Biden administration order was akin to “the government mandating business models” and implied it could threaten journals’ “accuracy, quality, and output.”
Some publishers, however, said it was too soon to tell how much the order would impact their business.
“While many early reports are signaling that OSTP’s guidance to federal agencies will substantially impact scientific publishers, we believe it is too soon to tell if this guidance will impact our journals,” Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and executive publisher of the Science journals, said in a statement.
Biden has called for increased public access for years, citing his longtime priority to eliminate cancers including glioblastoma, which killed his son Beau Biden.
“The taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research every year … but once it’s published, nearly all of that taxpayer-funded research sits behind walls,” then-Vice President Biden said at a 2016 American Association for Cancer Research event. “Tell me how this is moving the process along more rapidly.”
The Obama administration three years earlier directed federal agencies with more than $100 million in annual research funding to increase public access to those studies but allowed for a yearlong embargo on public access to the studies and accompanying data. Scientific journals often deploy those embargoes to encourage subscriptions.
National Institutes of Health Director Lawrence Tabak, whose sprawling agency directs more than $40 billion in research funding, pledged Thursday to swiftly release plans to execute the new policy.
“We are enthusiastic to move forward on these important efforts to make research results more accessible and look forward to working together to strengthen our shared responsibility in making federally funded research results accessible to the public,” he said in a statement.
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