The White House released its directive in 2013, with implementation beginning October 2014. Timetables vary by agency.

White House Directive

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 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 public access plan (updated & in effect October 2024)

Implementation timeline: For publications and data, DOE issued guidance in December 2024 and requires full implementation by December 31, 2025. For persistent identifiers, the OSTP Public Access Memo requires new policies to be issued by December 31, 2026, with full implementation by December 31, 2027.

Publications

• Submit the full-text accepted manuscript of a journal article and associated metadata to DOE’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) through E-Link or through labs’ publication management systems no later than the publication date of the article.
• If the article is published open access (not behind a paywall), submit the OA article and metadata to DOE. DOE will provide immediate, free public access to submitted publications through its designated repository DOE PAGES.

Data

• New guidance for data will be developed for implementation, which will cover details as described in the 2023 plan.
• Applications require a data management and sharing plan (DMSP), a living document which covers “unclassified and otherwise unrestricted digital scientific data arising from research and development activities undertaken with DOE funds,” (including those data and materials not in publications) and at a minimum address “what data will be publicly shared, the data or metadata standards that will be used, any related tools, software, or code, how data will be shared and preserved, and any necessary data protections.” Costs may be included in the proposed budget. Current DOE guidance on DMPs
• Go to the Libraries data management website for more details

 

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).

DOT site on how to comply

EPA public access plan (in effect January 2, 2025)

Publications

• When a journal does not submit a journal publication or an author manuscript associated with the journal publication directly to PubMed Central, the grant recipient must make the author manuscript accessible to the public at no charge via PMC. Recipients must submit their manuscript to PMC within 30 days of journal publication.

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 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 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 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 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 public access plan (updated 2023)

NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD), which funds 70% of all NASA extramural research, has updated public access requirements for publications and data management effective December 2, 2022. The public access policy for all of NASA is not yet in effect. (from SPARC)

NASA SMD updated publications policy

Publications (policy from 2013)

• 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.

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

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.

Publications

NIH public access policy, updated in December 2024

• The 2024 policy goes into effect for journal articles accepted for publication on or after July 1, 2025.
• The policy requires immediate public access to articles. Embargoes are no longer permitted.
• Authors should submit peer reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central (PMC) upon acceptance for publication. Find submission instructions on the NIH website.
• As stated by NIH, authors do not have to pay a fee to publishers in order to comply with the policy.
  NIH’s grant agreement gives the government a license to share the author’s accepted manuscript of articles. Beyond this, MIT’s open access policy allows authors to hold onto sufficient rights to share this version, though several publishers require waivers. These include Elsevier, ACS, and IOP. Contact us with questions.

Data

Updated in January 2023

• National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy for Data Management and Sharing, effective January 25, 2023: promotes the management and sharing of scientific data generated from NIH-funded or conducted research and requires data management plans within grant proposals.
  • MIT’s Key Points: NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy (PDF)
  • MIT Resources for NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing (PDF)
• Go to the Libraries data management website for more details

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 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 public access plan for publications and data (updated and in effect January 2025)

 

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 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