Public Access to Federally Funded Research

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a new memo requiring all federal agencies that fund research provide immediate public access to resulting research data and scholarly publications. This new memo removes the option of a 12 months embargo, and it extends the requirement agencies with less than $100 million in annual research and development expenditures. This column investigates the possible impacts of the broader policy, including introducing the public access requirement to new agencies and academic disciplines, and how a repository approach to public access might intersect with publisher provided open access.