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Comply with Public Access Policies

Information on government and other funder mandates for public access to articles and data generated by funded research.

New public access regulations will be announced by all federal agencies by December 31, 2024, to become effective December 31, 2025.

In 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released an updated memorandum on public access: 

This new memo expands on and adds to the provisions already in place from the 2013 public access memo:

OSTP guidance timeline: In 2013, the OSTP Holdren Memo on public access was issued. In 2022, the OSTP Nelson Memo expanding public access was issued. In 2023, federal funding agencies submitted expanded public access proposals to the United States OMB. December 2024 was the deadline for final versions of agencies' guidance to be issued to the public. On December 31, 2025 new agency guidance will become effective.

The new public access memo will affect articles and data resulting from U.S. federal research funding. It will not replace current public access processes, but will add further recommendations. The 2022 memo recommends that federal funders issue expanded policies that will:

  • Provide free, immediate, and equitable access to research that is federally funded
    • Specifically it states that publications should be made freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication
  • Extend publication access policies to affect a broader range of publications such as peer-reviewed book chapters, editorials, and conference proceedings 
  • Improve infrastructural requirements for where and how articles and data from funded research are shared, including using appropriate metadata (such as author names, affiliations, and funding sources), applying persistent identifiers for all research outputs, and making article text machine readable 
  • Apply data sharing requirements to require the ethical sharing of research data needed to validate the conclusions of articles immediately on publication of those articles, and develop approaches for sharing funded scientific data not associated with research publications (such as reporting variables that were collected but were not associated with any finding significant enough for publication)

Frequently Asked Questions about public access

What effect does this have on my research now?

Typically, none. The Nelson Memo policies will not come into effect until the end of 2025. However, agencies may voluntarily choose to make updates earlier and then update again in 2024.

Whatever public policies your funder has in place (like the recently-effective NIH data management and sharing policy), those policies remain in effect.

How do I share articles for current public access article sharing?

How do I share data for current public access dataset sharing?