Research funder requirements
News update: On August 25, 2022, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum on Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research that will make taxpayer-funded research immediately available for the public to freely access and fully use. This new guidance calls on all federal agencies to generate policies that eliminate the current 12-month embargo on making articles and data open.
Read the Libraries news story on the memo. We will update our information below as we learn how funders are changing their policies.
Major US research funder open access requirements for publications and data are summarized below.
Many individual journals have policies requiring open access to the data that underlies a publication, for the purposes of replication and further research. Lists of such policies are available here: MIT Libraries data management site, Open Access Directory.
The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) released a website for tracking and understanding federal agencies’ sharing policies for publications and data.
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Directive
The White House released its directive in 2013, with implementation beginning October 2014. Timetables vary by agency.
Publications
- All federal agencies over $100M annually in R&D are required to make final peer-reviewed manuscripts available within 12 months. Final manuscripts are those accepted by the journal but not yet laid out in the publisher’s formatting.
Data
- All federal agencies over $100M annually in R&D required to make data stored and publicly accessible to search, retrieve, and analyze.
- Scope: data necessary to validate research findings, including data sets used to support scholarly publications.
DOD – US Department of Defense
DOD public access plan
Publications
- Submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts (or the final published article, if the author has rights) to the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) upon acceptance for publication.
- Articles must be available no later than 12 months following publication.
Data
- Data management plans required, focusing on data “required to validate research findings.”
- DOD will develop requirements for authors to submit metadata to Defense Technical Information Center. The metadata for scientific data will include, at a minimum, the common core metadata schema in use by the federal government, found here.
DOE – US Department of Energy
DOE public access plan
Publications
- Submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts to an open access repository such as DSpace@MIT or DOE’s new PAGES service. You must also submit information about publications to DOE.
- Submit your paper to DSpace@MIT. You will receive a persistent URL for the article in DSpace, which you can send to the DOE’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information along with other information about your publication. A publicly accessible record of the paper will appear in DSpace, but the article itself will be embargoed for up to 12 months after publication depending on the publisher’s policy and the applicability of the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy.
- Alternatively, you can deposit your paper directly to DOE.
Data
- Data management plans required, focusing on digital data required to validate research findings.
DOT – US Department of Transportation
DOT public access plan
Publications
- Submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts to the National Transportation Library digital repository when articles are accepted for publication, to be made public no later than 12 months after publication. You must also submit other written deliverables, such as intramural technical or final reports.
- Submit research project descriptions to the Transportation Research Board’s Research-in-Progress (RiP) database.
Data
- Data management plans required, focusing on long-term preservation of, and access to, digital data sets (digitally recorded factual materials resulting from research that is necessary to validate research findings).
- DMPs must specify where research data will be deposited.
- Deposit data at the time of initial publication of any related peer reviewed journal article.
- Submit research project descriptions to the Transportation Research Board’s Research-in-Progress (RiP) database (for subsequent ingestion into the USDOT Research hub).
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
EPA public access plan
Publications
- Submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts to PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication.
- From the EPA plan: “EPA will develop standard extramural award terms and provide guidance to future research award recipients regarding public access to publications, including refraining from signing any agreements with publishers that restrict EPA’s license rights and depositing publications in PMC.”
Data
- Data management plans required, focusing on research data supporting peer reviewed publications.
- Data should be made available through publicly accessible data repositories within 30 days of posting the paper in PubMed Central, unless the DMP states reasons for not sharing.
- Researchers must register metadata in the EPA’s Environmental Dataset Gateway.
Ford Foundation
Ford Foundation open licensing policy
Publications
- Make freely available all copyrightable products funded by the grant, including white papers, research reports, and websites, and license them under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
Data
- The requirement to license funded products under the the CC BY 4.0 license applies to “all copyrightable products.”
Gates Foundation
Gates Foundation open access policy
Publications
- Make publications openly accessible in a repository under a Creative Commons Attribution license immediately upon publication.
- Gates Foundation will pay “reasonable fees” to a publisher for an article to meet the open access policy requirements.
Data
- Make data underlying the published research results immediately accessible and open.
HHMI – Howard Hughes Medical Institute
HHMI public access to publications policy
Publications
- HHMI laboratory heads who are “major authors” on papers must ensure articles are freely accessible within 12 months of publication.
- If the journal is in the biological/biomedical sciences, make the article available through PubMed Central. If the journal is in another scientific field, deposit articles in a “comparable repository.”
Data
- Make supplementary materials available along with the publication.
IES – US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences
IES public access policy
Publications
- Submit peer-reviewed, accepted manuscripts to the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) within 12 months of publication.
- Instructions for submitting papers.
Data
- Data management plans required, focusing on final research data from grants.
- Make research data available in a timely fashion, and no later than the time of publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly publication.
NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NASA public access plan
Publications
- Submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts (or the final published version of record, by publisher agreement) to NASA PubSpace on the PubMed Central platform.
- Articles must be freely available no more than 12 months following publication.
Data
- Data management plans required, focusing on “research data that underlie the results and findings in peer-reviewed publications.”
- Data must be accessible at the time of publication or “within a reasonable time period.”
- Data can be made available as supplementary information to the published article, through NASA archives or another data repository.
National Endowment for the Humanities: Office of Digital Humanities
Publications
- n/a
Data
- Data management plans required, focusing on materials generated or collected during the course of conducting research.
- DMP guidelines from NEH: Office of Digital Humanities
NIJ – National Institute of Justice
Data archiving plans for NIJ funding applicants
Data
- Data archiving plan required.
- Data sets resulting from funded research archived with the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) and submitted 90 days before the end of the project period.
NIH – National Institutes of Health
NIH public access policy
Publications
- Final peer-reviewed manuscripts (or final published versions, if the publisher allows) must be shared within 12 months via PubMedCentral.
- Authors submit here.
- Details for MIT authors on complying with the NIH policy
Data
- Data management and sharing plans required for all grants resulting in the generation of scientific data.
- Sharing timeline: Scientific data should be shared as soon as possible, or the earlier of either an article publication date or the end of the performance period.
- Other NIH data sharing plans may apply to your research. Which policies apply to my research?
- NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy
- NIH Scientific Data Sharing site
NOAA – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
NOAA public access plan
Publications
- Submit final peer reviewed manuscripts to the NOAA Institutional Repository for sharing within 12 months.
Data
- Data management plans required, focusing on environmental data collected during the course of funded research (section 3, bullet 5)
- Data sharing is required within a timely fashion, typically within two years and no later than the publication of a peer-reviewed article based on the data.
- Submit data to the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information or to a publicly-accessible data repository.
NSF – National Science Foundation
NSF public access plan
Publications
- Submit final peer-reviewed accepted manuscripts for journal articles and juried conference papers (or the final published version if the publisher allows) to the NSF Public Access Repository to be openly available no later than 12 months following publication.
- Along with the article, submit 8 metadata fields describing the work articles.
Data
- Data management plans required, focusing on “primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of work under NSF grants.”
- Limit of two pages.
- DMP guidelines from NSF
Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian public access plan
Publications/Data
- Plan does not apply to MIT grantees of the Smithsonian Institution, or to grant recipients at other universities.
USDA – United States Department of Agriculture
USDA public access plan
Publications
- Submit final peer reviewed manuscripts (or the final published version, if the publisher allows) to the USDA PubAg archive upon acceptance to publication, to be shared within 12 months.
Data
- Data management plans required, focusing on digital data underlying the conclusions of peer-reviewed scientific research publications
USGS – US Geological Survey
USGS public access plan
Publications
- Final, peer-reviewed, accepted manuscripts for journal articles (or the final published version of record) must be made openly accessible from USGS archive or publisher’s website no later than 12 months following publication.
Data
- Data management plans required, focusing on digital data required to validate research finding arising from complete or partial USGS funding.
- Data must be made available at the time of publication to support scholarly conclusions.
- Submit data the appropriate internal USGS data repository. Data can also be submitted to a trusted third-party distribution repository, but the authoritative version of the data is maintained by the USGS.
- Metadata describing the data must be indexed in the USGS Science Data Catalog.
- USGS data management guidance
Page last updated: February 7, 2023
Contact us
Publications: oarequirements@mit.edu
Data: data-management@mit.edu