Public Access Policy released: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

The Agency for Healthcare Research aahrq logond Quality  (AHRQ) released its Public Access Policy in February 2015, in compliance with the White House Directive. The policy covers both publications and data.

Publications
As of February 2015, AHRQ requires that authors submit the final peer-reviewed accepted journal manuscripts to PubMed Central (PMC). The AHRQ “will accept the final published article [instead of the manuscript], provided the awardee can ensure AHRQ has the rights to make the published version public.” The articles must be available no later than 12 months following publication.

Data
As of October 2015, AHRQ-funded researchers “will be required to include a data management plan for sharing final research data in digital format, or state why data sharing is not possible.” The policy focuses on data “necessary to validate research findings including data sets used to support scholarly publications.” AHRQ will contract with a commercial repository that will accept and manage the data.

Whitehouse Office of Science and Technology Policy Directive

The AHRQ policy is the latest issued under the White House directive that requires Federal agencies with annual spending of more than $100M in Research & Development to develop plans to make the data and publications that flow from the research they fund openly available to the public.

doe logoThe DOE was the first agency to release its open access plan in response to this directive.  Other agencies are expected to release their plans in the coming months. Major policies that affect MIT researchers will be summarized on the scholarly publishing website as they emerge.

The Libraries can help you comply with these new requirements:

  • For assistance in creating your data management plan for the DOE or AHRQ, or for any aspect of complying with the funder data sharing requirements, contact the Libraries’ data management team at data-management@mit.edu.
  • To comply with the DOE publication requirements, MIT researchers may submit their final accepted manuscripts to MIT’s institutional repository DSpace@MIT through a simple web form.

In coming months, the Libraries will be evaluating what other services may be of help to researchers in complying with these public access policies. If you have comments or suggestions, 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