Department of Defense releases draft Public Access Plan

The Department of Defense (DoD) released a draft Public Access Plan this week, in compliance with the White House Directive. The plan covers both publications and data, and is expected to be implemented in contract and grant regulations in the fourth quarter of FY16.

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Publications

The DoD’s draft plan requires that authors make openly accessible their final accepted peer-reviewed journal manuscripts (or the final published article, if the author has sufficient rights).

  • Authors will be required to upload their articles to the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) at the time of acceptance, when the final title and date of publication are known.
  • The articles will be available no later than 12 months following publication.
  • Compliance tracking for journal articles is expected to begin in FY16.

Data

DoD now requires grantees to manage and share their data by:

  • Including with proposals a data management plans (DMP) that describes how data “necessary to validate research findings” will be stored and shared.
  • Submitting metadata for each data set to DTIC’s DoD data set catalog, “including subject, characteristics, and location,” which will assist with discovery as well as compliance.
  • Compliance tracking for data management plans is expected to begin in FY17.

More information is available in a recent news story about the Plan.

The Libraries can help you comply with these new requirements:

  • For assistance in creating your data management plan, creating or submitting your metadatato DoD, or for any aspect of complying with funder data sharing requirements, contact the Libraries’ data management team at data-management@mit.edu.
  • To ensure authors retain sufficient rights to allow for manuscript deposit in the DTIC, authors may use an amendment to publication agreements specifically designed to accommodate the requirements of the White House Directive.

If you have comments or questions, please contact:

For publications: contact Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing, Copyright, and Licensing, MIT Libraries

For data: contact the MIT Libraries’ data management team