Because Your Funders Mandate It
In 2013, the White House, through the Office of Science and Technology Policy, issued an executive directive mandating that U.S. Government agencies with annual extramural research and development expenditures over $100 million make the results of taxpayer-funded research—both articles and data—be made freely available to the general public with the goal of accelerating scientific discovery and fueling innovation. Those agencies have begun adopting and issuing plans for the deposit of scholarly articles and data into openly accessible repositories.
Many federal funding agencies have responded to the OSTP memo by implementing open access policies for grant-funded projects. Some funders have been at the forefront of this movement; the National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, adopted in 2008 a policy requiring all NIH-funded research to be deposited within 12 months of publication into the repository PubMed Central. Others are just now implementing this kind of policy.
- SPARC Information on the Executive Directive on Public AccessLinks and analyses to federal funding agencies' responses to the OSTP memo.
- SPARC US Federal Funder Article and Data Sharing PoliciesAn up-to-date listing and comparison of current sharing policies from federal funding agencies for both research articles and research data
- Publication of Government-Funded Research, Open Access, and the Public InterestArticle (2016) on public access mandates in the context of the larger open access initiative. Nice overview of the issues and current state of programs and initiatives to further the principles of open access.
Adapted from Gordon Aamot's, Liz Bedford's and Maryam Fakouri's Open Access Research Guide from the University of Washington Research Guides
Because It Provides Benefits to You and to the World
The Open Access movement grew in response to an increasing awareness that the current scholarly publishing system is no longer meeting the needs of scholars and those who could benefit from their research. Making research openly available by bringing articles out from behind publisher paywalls has benefits for individual researchers, the wider research community, and the public at large.
Image CC-BY Danny Kingsley and Sarah Brown
Adapted from Gordon Aamot's, Liz Bedford's and Maryam Fakouri's Open Access Research Guide from the University of Washington Research Guides
Selected Private Funders
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Open Access Policy
Wellcome Trust Open Access Policy
American Heart Association Public Access Policy
Adapted from Gordon Aamot's, Liz Bedford's and Maryam Fakouri's Open Access Research Guide from the University of Washington Research Guides