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BIOPHYSICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
6
JUNE
2015
Public Access: Where Are
We Now?
The literature that should be freely accessible online
is that which scholars give to the world without
expectation of payment—
Budapest Open
Access Initiative
It has been almost two and a half years since the
Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
issued the February 22, 2013, memorandum,
Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded
Research
, which directs each federal agency with
more than $100 million in annual research and
development expenditures to develop a plan to
increase public access to research results funded
by the federal government.
This year, several plans for public access have
been rolled out.
In February 2015, the National Institutes of
Health released its
Plan for Increasing Access to
Scientific Publications and Digital Scientific Data
from NIH-Funded Scientific Research
. The agency
policy states:
The Director of the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) shall require in the current
fiscal year and thereafter that all investiga-
tors funded by the NIH submit or have
submitted for them to the National Library
of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic
version of their final, peer-reviewed manu-
scripts upon acceptance for publication, to
be made publicly available no later than 12
months after the official date of publication:
Provided, that the NIH shall implement the
public access policy in a manner consistent
with copyright law.
There were no surprises here as the PubMed
Central repository has been established for some
time now and authors and publishers have been
routinely depositing manuscripts as required.
In March 2015, the National Science Foundation
(NSF) announced a public access plan titled
To-
day’s Data, Tomorrow’s Discoveries
that will go into
effect January 2016. At that time, NSF-funded
articles in peer-reviewed journals and papers ac-
cepted for conference proceedings will need to be
deposited into a NSF-designated public reposi-
tory within 12 months of publication. NSF will
initially use the Department of Energy’s Public
Access Gateway for Energy and Science as the
agency’s public repository and it will be available
for NSF-funded authors to use on a voluntary
basis by the end of calendar 2015.
The Department of Energy (DOE) recently an-
nounced the signing of an agreement with Clear-
inghouse for the Open Research of the United
States (CHORUS) to ensure public access to
“the best available version of the article,” which
is defined as the version of record hosted by the
publisher. DOE will host a portal and a search
tool, the Public Access Gateway for Energy and
Science (PAGES), to facilitate discoverability
of scholarly publications resulting from DOE
funding. All researchers receiving DOE funding
will be required to submit metadata and a link
to the full-text accepted manuscript (or the full
text itself ) to the DOE Office of Scientific and
Technical Information.
Publisher's Forum
Institution
Embargo Period
Repository
NIH
Within 12 months
PubMed Central (PMC)
NSF
Within 12 months
Public Access Gateway for Engineering and Science
(PAGES)
DOE
Within 12 months
PAGES
Gates Foundation
Within 12 months until 2017 then
immediate open access
Specified in Foundation Grant
RCUK
No more than 6 months for STEM;
preference for immediate open
access
Specified in grant from individual Council
Public Access Summary