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Funders' Public Access (Open) Policies

Resources and information about open access and open data requirements of federal funding agencies and other funders..

Research Funder Public Access Policies and Requirements

Excerpt from Research Funder Open Access Requirements by MIT Libraries used under CC-BY-SA.

Agency / Entity Publications Data
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Directive

Office of Science & Technology Policy
All federal agencies over $100M annually in R&D required to make peer-reviewed manuscripts available within 12 months.

2013, with implementation beginning October 2014 and timetable varying by agency.

View the Directive
All federal agencies over $100M annually in R&D required to make data stored and publicly accessible to search, retrieve, and analyze.

Scope: data necessary to validate research findings, including data sets used to support scholarly publications. (Lab notebooks not included)
DoD

US Department of Defense
Public Access Plan

Draft in 2015, takes effect FY16

Authors will be required to upload their final accepted peer-reviewed journal manuscripts (or the final published article, if the author has sufficient rights) to the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) at the time of acceptance.

Articles will be available no later than 12 months following publication.
Public Access Plan

Draft in 2015, compliance begins FY17

Data Management Plans (DMPs) will be required, focusing on data “necessary to validate research findings.”

Metadata for each data set, “including subject, characteristics, and location, will be shared via DTIC’s DoD data set catalog.
DOE

US Department of Energy
Public Access Plan

October 1, 2014

Accepted manuscripts must be submitted to an open access repository, such as DSpace@MIT, or DOE’s new PAGES service.

Information about publications must also be submitted to DOE.
Public Access Plan

October 1, 2014 for Office of Science requirements.

Other DOE offices by end of 2015.

Proposals must include a Data Management Plan outlining how the data generated in research will be shared and preserved.
Ford Foundation Ford Foundation Open Licensing Policy

February 1, 2015

Requires that the grantee widely disseminate all copyrightable products funded by the grant—including white papers, research reports, and websites—and license them under the CC BY 4.0 license.
Ford Foundation Open Licensing Policy

February 1, 2015

Requirement to license funded products under the the CC BY 4.0 license applies to "all copyrightable products."
Gates Foundation

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Open Access Policy

January 1, 2015

Publications must be openly accessible in a repository under a Creative Commons Attribution license at time of publication.

(An embargo period of up to 12 months after publication is allowed during a transition period, until January 1, 2017.)
 
Open Access Policy

January 1, 2015

Data underlying the published research results must be immediately accessible and open.

(An embargo period of up to 12 months after publication is allowed during a transition period, until January 1, 2017.)
HHMI

Howard Hughes Medical Institute
2007

Requires publication in journals that allow articles to be freely accessible in a public repository within 12 months.

Applies to HHMI investigators, not to all grantees.
Policy includes supplementary materials
IES

US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences
Policy Regarding Public Access to Research

2012
n/a
NASA

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Public Access Plan

2015

Peer-reviewed accepted journal manuscripts (or the final published version of record, by publisher agreement) must be available no later than 12 months following publication.

Access will be through a NASA portal to the PubMed Central (PMC) platform.
 
Grants, contracts, directed research projects and other agreements require Data Management Plans:

January 1, 2015
 

  • Focus is on “research data that underlie the results and findings in peer-reviewed publications.”
  • Data must be accessible at the time of publication or “within a reasonable time period.”
  • Data can be made available via a journal publisher, through NASA archives, or another data repository.
NCAR

National Center for Atmospheric Research
Open Access Policy 2009

All peer reviewed research (final manuscript) publicly available through NCAR repository, OpenSky.
n/a
NEH : Office of Digital Humanities

National Endowment for the Humanities
n/a Data management plans required
NIH

National Institutes of Health
Public Access Policy

2008

Final peer-reviewed manuscript shared within 12 months via PubMedCentral.
Data Sharing Policy

Grants over $500K must include data sharing plan

Genomic Data Sharing Policy
8/2014
Grants must include data sharing plan; Data must be shared

For Genomic data: human data must be shared through NIH designated data repository; nonhuman data via any widely used data repository
NOAA

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
n/a Data Sharing Policy

2011
NSF

National Science Foundation
Public Access Plan

2015, takes effect January 2016

Authors must submit final peer-reviewed accepted manuscripts for journal articles and juried conference papers (or the final published version of record) to the DOE PAGES repository system to be openly available no later than 12 months following publication.

Authors must also submit 8 metadata fields describing their articles.
New 2015 Plan continues to require Data Management Plans:
Data Management Plan (DMP)

2011

DMP must address how the project will comply with the agency’s (pre-existing) Data Sharing Policy covering primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials
Journals: selected policies n/a Many journals have policies requiring open access to the data that underlies a publication, for the purposes of replication and further research.

Lists of such policies are available at these websites:

MIT Libraries data management website

Open Access Directory