The White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) issued an updated memorandum updating the 2013 White House OSTP Memorandum on Public Access to Publicly Funded Research Results to make “articles resulting from all U.S. federally funded research freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.”  It eliminates the 12-month embargo and makes articles—and the underlying data needed to validate results—openly available in machine readable formats.

PIJIP faculty have released the following statements:

Michael Carroll, Professor of Law, American University Washington College of Law:

This new White House policy guidance will finally make the results of federally-funded research immediately available on the Internet. This is a major milestone for the open access movement. Since 2004, when the National Institutes of Health adopted a voluntary policy for posting research online, those of us in the open access movement have argued that immediate online availability of research will speed the progress of science and provide more equitable access to research. Progress toward this goal has been slow and incremental. Then, during the early phase of this pandemic, we saw in real time how important immediate open access is to enable rapid response to a fast-moving public health crisis, as science publishers dropped their paywalls for articles reporting on the new virus. I am deeply grateful to the leadership in the Office of Science and Technology Policy for taking this important step to ensure immediate open access to all federally-funded science research. It would not have happened without the focus and tenacity of leaders in the library community and other open access advocates who have stayed the course. There is still much to be done, but this new policy is a welcome, overdue, and irreversible step forward.

Sean Flynn, Director, PIJIP, Principal Investigator, Project on the Right to Research and International Copyright:

Making taxpayer funded research default to free-to-use promotes access and use of research by all, which in turn promotes authorship, expression and the progress of science. Human rights to impart and receive information and expression and benefit from science require strong justification to not require publicly funded research to be freely usable by all. Open access should be the default policy for all government funded research everywhere.