University of California open access policy

The University of California recently announced that they are issuing a Presidential Open Access Policy that will cover all future scholarly articles published by UC employees.

The Presidential Open Access Policy extends the previous institutional open access policy which was adopted in 2013. The Presidential policy extends the 2013 Academic Senate Open Access Policy by covering all UC authors, including non-senate members. The new policy allows all UC authors to maintain legal control of their research outputs and also commits all UC authors to deposit their works in a repository for free public dissemination.

"The Presidential OA Policy represents the culmination of significant effort among UC faculty and staff to support increased access to their research publications, from the adoption of the first UC senate OA policy (UCSF) in 2012, to the establishment of the more comprehensive UC-wide Academic Senate policy in 2013." University of California Office of Scholarly Communication. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 licence.

Christopher Kelty, professor of Information Studies and Anthropology at UCLA explains the need for the new policy:

"Until now, tenure-track faculty have had the privilege of passing such policies to govern themselves, but at most universities, such faculty are a fraction of the people who do research and publish articles[...]Extending the same rights to those who aren’t part of a faculty governance system is an important and difficult step–I’m thrilled we have accomplished it.” University of California Office of Scholarly Communication. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 licence.

The UC's Open access policy creates a contract between the University and its authors that is prior to any contracts signed between authors and publishers. This means that UC authors can make their research open access via the University's repository, eScholarship, whilst also publishing in journals as normal. Authors are also granted rights of reuse under the UC open access policy that might otherwise be given over to publishers.

The University of California is a huge institution with nearly 200,000 employees and is responsible for over 2% of the world's research publications. UC clearly casts a large shadow, so this move represents a significant step in the evolution of scholarly research to open access.

Quotes are taken from University of California Office of Scholarly Communication Press release which was licensed under a CC BY 4.0 Licence. The press release can be found here: http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/10/groundbreaking-presidential-oa-policy-covers-all-employees/

Open access in the United States: land of the free (access to research)

Yellowstone national park, © Quan Yuan/Getty Images

In 2013, a memo from John Holdren, director for the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the White House, was sent to all heads of executive departments and agencies:

“The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) hereby directs each Federal agency with over $100 million in annual conduct of research and development expenditures to develop a plan to support increased public access to the results of research funded by the Federal Government. This includes any results published in peer-reviewed scholarly publications that are based on research that directly arises from Federal funds” OSTP memo p.2

Affected agencies were to be responsible for coming up with a plan to open up research outputs as well as data in line with the agenda set out in the memorandum. Plans would be required to have a number of key elements: fostering public/private partnerships, improving public access to data, improving access to research through searching and archiving facilities, etc.

The memo asked agencies to ensure that the public are able to read, download, and analyse peer-reviewed manuscripts and final published versions within a suggested 12 month time frame. The twelve month time frame mirrors that of both Canada and China (blogged about previously). Agencies should also ensure that metadata for research is made publicly available immediately upon first publication with a link to where final versions are available.

The US National Institute of Health has required research outputs to be publicly available after 12 months since 2008. Recently the US Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) took steps to further implement the plans set out in the OSTP memo. The HSS plans are designed to increase public access to the results of publicly funded research across five of its operating divisions. These HSS divisions include: National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR).

The HSS plans for public access to research involve two main areas:
•    Peer-reviewed outputs must be publicly available. Researchers funded by any of the 5 agencies will be required to deposit their publications in PubMed Central within 12 months of publication.
•    Data must be publicly available. Researchers will be required to produce a data management plan outlining how their data will stored and shared.

“A major focus over the coming year will be the policy development processes necessary to turn these plans into practice.  Several agencies, such as FDA, AHRQ and ASPR, will be developing public access policies for the first time. Other agencies, such as NIH and CDC, will be updating existing policies [...] We look forward to working together with all of the stakeholders to increase the usability of health research funded by HHS, and to creating an information ecosystem that will catalyze improvements in health and healthcare for all Americans.” HSS idea lab blog

Individual action plans can be found here:
•    NIH’s Public Access Plan
•    FDA’s Public Access Plan
•    CDC’s Public Access Plan
•    AHRQ’s Public Access Plan
•    ASPR’s Public Access Plan

Sources:
http://www.hhs.gov/open/public-access/index.html
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announces-open-access-policy.html
http://www.hhs.gov/idealab/2015/02/27/hhs-expands-approach-making-research-results-freely-available-public/