White House issues new public-access policy for federally funded research

Science : On 22 February, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a directive to all federal agencies that spend more than $100 million on scientific research. The new policy requires the results of all federally funded research be made freely available online within 12 months of the papers’ original publications. The requirement closely resembles the National Institutes of Health’s 2008 decision that all agency research be posted in PubMed Central within 12 months of initial publication. However, the OSTP’s policy does not specify where the agencies will publish the papers or how they will be indexed. Each agency has six months to draft a plan that will determine those details. For the last several years, there has been extensive debate, including a petition to the White House, about whether to make results of research freely available to the public. The new policy can be seen as a compromise solution between the position of publishers who make money from the journals where the papers are originally published and the open-access advocates who desire immediate and free access to results.