White House Directs Federal Funding Agencies to Prepare for Public Access

In February 2013, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a memo directing major federal funding agencies to develop plans to make the published results and digital data sets of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication.  Agencies with R&D budgets of more than $100 million, including NIH, NSF, NEH, USAid, among others are impacted.  This directive dovetails with the recent bipartisan public access bill FASTR introduced into both the House and Senate.  It is also in line with the mandate already in place by NIH, but expands to include data, not just journal articles.  (Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post about open data!)

The exact details of how this will roll out are still forthcoming, but, rest assured, various groups at Tufts are monitoring developments.  We are looking forward to working with our researchers to comply with the federal requirements as they are established.