Supporting the OSTP memorandum “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research”

Response to OSTP Memo

The undersigned Open Access scholarly publishers express our full support for Dr. Alondra Nelson’s United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum, “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research.” 

The memo requires US federal granting bodies to develop and implement new policies making all taxpayer-funded scholarly research and underlying raw data freely and publicly available without embargo by 2026. The guidance applies to all federal agencies with R&D expenditures, regardless of budget size or the subject area of the research being funded.

Our main message is simple: publishing in any journal published by this group already meets or exceeds the requirements outlined in the OSTP memo. 

Free public access

We are fully Open Access publishers. Everything we publish is available under a CC BY copyright license. This means the research is not only publicly accessible—it’s also freely available for redistribution, remixing, and reuse.

No embargoes or delays

The content we publish is always immediately freely available for anyone to read, cite, share, or build upon. We enthusiastically support moving away from notions of embargoes, and the old conversations about shortening or lengthening them. One of the first calls from national leaders' on science policy (including the OSTP) at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic was to make research related to the pandemic freely available. Most publishers who were not already Open Access complied with this call. We strongly believe that there is consensus across the research community that the current mixed model landscape of published research is no longer in the best service of science, health, technology, and scholarship whether inside or outside a time of crisis. 

Machine readable

All our content is fully machine readable, indexed, and archived to enhance discoverability, and to enable further cross-referencing, processing, and analysis. 

Public data

“Scientific data underlying peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research should be made freely available and publicly accessible by default at the time of publication” p. 4

Many fully OA publishers already require all authors to share the raw data underlying each study upon publication when it is legally and ethically possible to do so. Whether or not this is mandatory for an individual publisher, we all stand ready to support US federally funded authors to publicly share data when they are required to do so.

Conclusion

We all agree that this federal policy from the OSTP is an important step forward for Open Access and Open Science. Fully OA publishers have always supported this level of immediate openness, and we stand ready to help the OSTP implement these requirements.

While there remain other issues around Open Access that still need addressing by the research community and scholarly publishing community, let us all ensure we celebrate these important steps forward, and discuss the remaining issues and perspectives transparently, working together to improve upon our work, in the spirit of Open Access itself. 

Signatory Publishers

Copernicus Publications
eLife
Frontiers
JMIR Publications
MDPI
Open Library of Humanities
PeerJ 
PLOS
Ubiquity Press

Fully OA Interest Group

As a reminder, our OASPA Interest Group intends to provide a platform for exchange and collaboration among “fully Open Access” scholarly journal publishers. The aim of the group is to provide unity, not by creating one voice for full OA publishers, but by bringing together a diversity of different voices. By “fully” OA, this means such publishers who publish 100% of their journal content OA and are not mixed model nor in any kind of transition to OA.

For individual publisher responses to the OSTP memo, see any links next to the publisher names, below.

Frontiers [Individual post] 

MDPI [Individual post]

PLOS [Individual post]

Authored by

PLOS, with review and contributions from Copernicus Publications, eLife, Frontiers, JMIR Publications, MDPI, The Open Library of Humanities (OLH), PeerJ, Ubiquity Press