1. Here There Be Dragons
Public Access to Federally Funded Research
Overview of the Open Access Landscape
Open Access to Federally Funded Research:
Current Status and Future Directions
January 24, 2014
Richard Huffine, Senior Director
U.S. Federal Government Market, ProQuest

2. Overview
• Definition
• Types of Open Access
• The Audience for Open
Access
• Mandates
• Open Versus Public
• U.S. Federal Government
Mandate
• Don’t Forget the Data!
• Current State
• Role of Providers
•
•
•
•
•
•
Potential Opportunities
Controversies
Changing Landscape
Future State
*A Note About Copyright
Questions and Feedback

3. Definition
• Open Access – “literature [and data that] is digital, online, free of
charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
– Peter Suber, co-founder of the Open Access Directory (OAD) (with Robin
Peek)
http://www.wordle.net/create

4. Types of Open Access
• GOLD OA – content where the cost barrier is removed by
journals, regardless of their business model, with permission
of the copyright holder
• GREEN OA – content where the cost barrier is removed by
serving the content through institutional repositories or by
“self-archiving” by the author or copyright holder
• CLEAR OA – content where both the cost
and permissions barriers have been
removed (e.g. libre OA)

5. Types of Open Access
• Gold open access includes:
– Journals dedicated to being open. These are typically supported by
Author Page Charges (APCs) and they can be operated by
commercial publishers, societies, or non-governmental
organizations dedicated to that model.
– Articles in subscription journals. Some publishers offer APCs within
subscription journals or selectively make articles open within the
context of their subscription offerings. Some publishers are also
lowering subscription rates based on the percentage of articles that
are published as open access.
– Content made open after an embargo period.
Some publishers make their content open
after an embargo period, regardless of how
the research was funded.
– Supplemental data can be included by the
publisher, posted by the author to their own
site, or embargoed along with the articles.
Practices vary greatly across disciplines.

6. Types of Open Access
• Green open access includes:
– Research deposited either directly by the authors or on
their behalf by the publisher.
– Author’s final drafts or a copy of the published
article, depending often on terms defined in agreements
signed by authors and publishers prior to acceptance of
the paper.
– Research data can be deposited along
with articles, as separate submissions, or
linked out from repositories and hosted on
departmental services.
• The practices for data access vary greatly and
depend on what formats institutional repositories
accept and how the data can be provided for
review, analysis and re-use.

7. Types of Open Access
• Clear (libre) open access includes:
– In the United States, works in the “public domain,”
specifically intramural research products produced by
federal employees in the normal course of their work.
– Works produced and distributed for free and with a
disclaimer that provides for redistribution, re-use and
repurposing. This may include creative commons and
other types of licensing.
– There is some discussion and debate about what
extent of licensing can constitute clear or libre OA.
Some policies are explicit but many are not.
– The issues involve attribution, commercial use,
and the creation of derivative works.
– The issue gets more complicated when considering
data sets and the rights provided or restricted in
their release.

8. The Audience for Open Access
• Originally, scholarly communications were peer-to-peer with a very
defined audience for the work of research.
• As publishing and scholarship matured, the audience widened within
communities and scientific disciplines.
– Research disciplines splintered off and aligned with one another as an
ebb and flow of communications advanced scientific understanding
– We have one from Discipline to Cross-Disciplined to Interdisciplinary
• As the Internet was established, a broader audience was
recognized, that of the public at large.
– Some research became accessible to anyone with a connection to the
Internet and disparities across disciplines were recognized.
• We now see value in the potential of finding
relevant research in any number of places and
across all disciplines of practice.

9. Mandates
• An open access mandate is a policy, adopted by a
research institution, research funder, or government
entity, requiring researchers (e.g.
employees, faculty, research grant recipients) to make
the outcome of their work available without fee.
• SHERPA/JULIET – Database of research funders archiving mandates and guidelines http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/index.php

10. Mandates
• In addition to open access mandates from funders, many
employers and academic institutions are instituting
policies that ensure their rights to the products of work
conducted by their researchers.
https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/policies

11. Open Versus Public
• Using the term open access typically means that research is
available without a fee and that there are some rights
provided for re-use, redistribution, etc.
• The term Public Access does not carry those same
assumptions. Public Access policies may leave the question
of rights to the authors and their publishers.
– This is the case with the NIH Public Access policy today.
• Public Domain, on the other hand, applies to research
produced by the Federal government or by employees in the
course of their daily work. Public Domain material has no
copyright associated with it.
– Publishers may, however, assert copyright over the format of research
produced by federal employees.
– Some federal employees have also signed copyright over to publishers
even though there was no copyright to relinquish.

12. U.S. Federal Government Mandate
• The U.S. Government has tried to legislate open access
without success:
– Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) proposed
requiring open public access to research funded by eleven U.S.
federal government agencies. It was proposed by Senators John
Cornyn and Joe Lieberman in 2006 and then again in 2010, and
then once more in 2012.
– Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) is
a bi-partisan effort intended to make federally supported
research more readily and publicly available. It was proposed by
Sens. Wyden (D)and Cronyn (R) and House
members Lofgren (D), Doyle (D), and Yoder (R).

13. U.S. Federal Government Mandate
• Other legislation has also been proposed to restrict open
access. These include:
– Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (2009)
– Research Works Act (2011)
– Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology
Act (FIRST) (2013)
• These proposals have been viewed
as efforts to protect the investment
made in scientific publishing by
publishers.

14. U.S. Federal Government Mandate
• In lieu of legislation, the National Institutes of Health instituted a
public access policy in 2005 that applied to all research funded by
the NIH.
• That policy was codified in appropriations legislation in 2008 [see
Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated
Appropriations Act, 2008)]

15. U.S. Federal Government Mandate
• The Obama Administration took on a series of conversations with
funders, researchers, publishers, and academic institutions.
• Those conversations culminated in a February 22, 2013 memoranda
from the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy
(OSTP), directing Agencies develop plans to support increased
public access to the results of research funded by the Federal
Government.

16. U.S. Federal Government Mandate
• The OSTP Memo does not specify Open Access publishing or
self-archiving.
• It doesn’t directly address the copyright of works funded by
the government either.
• It does address the potential for embargo periods, to be
established based in part on the “challenges and public
interests that are unique to each field and mission
combination.”
• It is unique in that it doesn’t stop with making
the published results of research publicly
accessible. It also identifies objectives for
public access to scientific data in
digital formats.

17. U.S. Federal Government Mandate
• With the 2014 Omnibus Spending Bill, Congress codified
Public Access requirements for the Departments of
Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education
(page 1,020 of the 1,582 page bill, H.R. 3547)
• The specifics in the Omnibus bill include:
– Submission of a “machine-readable version” of the author’s final, peerreviewed manuscripts
– Free online public access of either the manuscripts or published
versions not later than 12 months after the official date of
publication, and
– Compliance with all relevant copyright laws
• Congress also asked all of the other Departments and
Agencies identified in the OSTP memo to report on their
progress within 45 days and with semi-annual updates
thereafter.

18. Don’t Forget the Data!
• The OSTP Memo goes beyond the established practices
of open access mandates to direct Agencies to also
maximize access, by the general public and without
charge, to digitally formatted scientific data created with
Federal funds.
• Agency plans must also address requirements for data
management plans from all intramural (government
employees) and extramural (Federal grantees and
contractors) researchers
– The National Science Foundation began requiring
Data Management Plans in 2011 of all of their
extramural grantees.

19. Current State
• Federal agencies impacted by the OSTP Memo (those with over
$100 million in annual conduct of research and development
expenditures) have been meeting in two groups (publications and
data) since the memo was released.
• Draft plans were due to OSTP by late August 2013. They were to
provide feedback quickly.
• Agencies are expected to start sharing their Public Access plans for
stakeholder and public input in early 2014.
• Once adopted, modifications to contract and
grant language will be required for
implementation.
• The current government-wide shutdown
will definitely impact their planned schedule.

20. Role of Providers
• The OSTP Memo encourages Agencies to work together to
address the issues and to leverage archives and strategies for
accomplishing the goal of broader public access.
• The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has developed
a solution for the challenge, the Clearinghouse for the Open
Research of the United States or CHORUS.
• SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) is
another alternative that has been proposed by
Proposed by the Association of Research
Libraries (ARL), Association of American
Universities (AAU), and the Association of
Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU)

21. Role of Providers
• The National Institutes of Health system, PubMedCentral is
presumed to meet the requirements of the OSTP Memo for
NIH and other agencies that can use that system
• The Department of Energy has developed a prototype
clearinghouse for DOE funded research that will be able to
link to articles wherever they are provided by the
authors, publishers, or institutions.
• Researchers will have the choice of publishing in Open
Access journals, working with commercial publishers to
comply with the policy or self-archiving their
research in order to comply with the policy.
• The strategy for releasing the data associated
with research will likely also have a number of
options for compliance.

22. Role of Providers
• Options for providing access to both the publications and the
data will continue to evolve with new business models
continuing to develop.
• A number of efforts are underway to improve discovery and
access, including:
– DOIs and Handles for persistent linking to digital objects
– ORCID for linking the works of a specific individual
– VIAF and ISNI for linking the work funded or
conducted by specific institutions or organizations
– FUNDREF for linking the outcomes of specific
funding efforts
– DATA CITE for linking to data

23. Potential Opportunities
• Publishers, aggregators, and other information intermediaries
have opportunities in this new environment:
–
–
–
–
Provide enhanced discovery for researchers
Provide tools for compliance with Open Access and Public Access policies
Utilize identifiers to identify, index, and link to Open Access content
Add value through additional indexing description and associations
• The business models for Open Access and
Public Access are still evolving and there are a
number of ways value can be added and
realized in this process.

24. Controversies
• Open Access publishing is not without its
controversies, detractors, champions, and antagonists:
– Librarian Jeffrey Beall has developed a list of predatory publishers and
been sued over his efforts.
(see his Website at www.scholarlyoa.com )
– Journalist John Bohannon investigated peer review in Open Access
journals for Science magazine in October 2013.
(see: DOI:10.1126/science.342.6154.60)
– Research Council UK’s decision to “prefer” gold over green OA for
research they fund continues to be controversial.
(see: www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/Pages/outputs.aspx)
– Researcher Michael Eisen’s “liberation” of NASA Curiosity research
published in Science in September 2013, challenges both publishers
and federal agencies to change their practices sooner than later.
(see: www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1430)

25. Changing Landscape
• The popular press and scholarly literature is struggling to
define and understand the changing landscape of open
access.
• Recent news stories have challenged the validity of Open
Access journals and have challenged the peer-review process
conducted by these providers.
• Self-archiving is being criticized because it may
not be the best record of a work published
commercially.
• Institutional repositories struggle to be indexed
and seen as trusted repositories of research.
• The distribution of multiple copies of a
publication or data set would further proliferate
multiple identifiers for the same work.

26. Future State
• Open Access publishing and archiving are growing activities
in a number of research disciplines today.
• The business models for providing open access and public
access are evolving and a number of examples exist that
have proven viable and accepted in their communities.
• The U.S. Federal Government has chosen to implement
policies that take advantage of these new strategies for
publication and dissemination.
• The ultimate outcome will likely continue
to be a variety of strategies, depending on
the maturity of the research discipline and
the willingness of researchers, institutions,
societies, publishers, and funders to work
together.

27. *A Note About Copyright
• As mentioned earlier, the OSTP Memo does not explicitly mention
copyright in their guidance. We do not know if the Agency Plans will
explicitly address it.
• It is presumed that authors of federally funded research will continue
to retain, transfer, and define the copyrights associated with their
work.
• Work by government employees, done in the course of their daily
jobs, is considered in the public domain and cannot have copyright
assigned or transferred.
• Whether publishers can or will wish to copyright
the format, structure or presentation of
publications and data will potentially determine
how the policies address what is made available and
with what permissions.
• Works can be controlled under copyright and still be
made Open Access or publicly accessible. Licensing
like Creative Commons can also be used to
communicate permissions in such an instance.

28. Questions and Feedback
Feedback:
Richard Huffine, Senior Director
U.S. Federal Government
Market, ProQuest
301-968-3930
richard.huffine@proquest.com