Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECLAC/United Nations.

In a Memorandum dated 25th August 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) instructs federal agencies to make their scientific research – publications and supporting data – immediately free to access and available to all, as soon as possible and no later than 31st December 2025. The possibility of a twelve-month embargo from the previous policy, dated 2013, will be discontinued.

This policy update is a significant step towards global Open Science. United States researchers and taxpayers will now be able to access research immediately and without restrictions. In effect, any researcher and citizen from anywhere in the world will benefit, therefore it should be widely celebrated. Speedy access to quality research is crucial for scientific progress and for dealing with major challenges such as climate change and pandemics. This fundamental shift in how we share scientific results, as fast and widely as possible, is what we call Open Science.

Open Science is also about removing inequities amongst researchers, research institutions and citizens. This new US policy explicitly refers to this objective. However, there is still some way to go until we have eliminated fundamental biases that affect researchers, institutions, countries, and regions with fewer financial resources. We inherited these inequities from traditional scholarly communication. The remedy is to redouble our efforts to make Open Science a global reality by accelerating the implementation of effective research data management, making data available in machine readable formats, and coordinating institutional, regional, and global Open Science infrastructures.

With this new US policy, open access has finally been consecrated as the global standard for top research. Researchers and citizens from all over the world will benefit immensely from it. But we need to avoid maintaining existing, or creating new, inequities for less privileged institutions who are unable to make their publications and data available, visible, and usable to the same extent as institutions from the US and the EU. Achieving full Open Science is about giving the same opportunities to quality research to anywhere in the world.

Biography

Wouter Schallier is Chief of the Hernán Santa Cruz Library of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, in Santiago, Chile.

Wouter has a master's degree in “Linguistics and Literature: Latin and Greek,” a Diploma in "Medieval Studies” and a Master’s in “Information and Library Sciences.” Wouter started his professional career at K.U. Leuven University, Belgium, first as coordinator of several innovation projects and later as Director of the Library of Medicine and Pharmacy.

Between 2008 and 2012, Wouter Schallier was Executive Director of LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries), in The Hague, The Netherlands. As Chief of the Hernán Santa Cruz (ECLAC) Library, Wouter launched the ECLAC Digital Repository, giving open access to all publications of the United Nations Regional Commission. Between 2015 and 2017, Wouter led the Latin American and Caribbean chapter of the LEARN project on Research Data Management.