The White House released its directive in 2013, with implementation beginning October 2014.

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.

On August 25, 2022, the OSTP issued a memorandum, Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, to make taxpayer-funded research immediately available for the public to freely access and use.

This guidance updates and strengthens the 2013 OSTP directive by calling on all federal agencies to generate policies that eliminate the 12-month embargo on making articles and data open. Read the Libraries news story on the 2022 memo.

*Federal funders are releasing public access policies based on the 2022 memo at different times. If an update is not noted, the information refers to policies resulting from the 2013 OSTP memo. We will update individual agencies’ guidance as they release it.

DOD released its public access plan in December 2024. DOD has not yet released its public access policy.

Current/old policy:

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 (based on 2013 directive)

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 (in effect January 1, 2025)

Publications

• Funded manuscripts shall be published as a preprint in a preprint server recognized by the foundation or preapproved preprint server which applies a sufficient level of scrutiny to submissions.
• Accepted articles shall be deposited immediately upon publication in PubMed Central or in another openly accessible repository.
• All funded manuscripts, including any subsequent updates to key conclusions, shall be available immediately, without any embargo, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) or an equivalent license.
• The foundation will not pay APCs.

Data

• Underlying data supporting the funded manuscripts shall be made accessible immediately and as open as possible upon availability of the funded manuscripts, subject to any applicable ethical, legal, or regulatory requirements or restrictions

HHMI public access policy (in effect January 1, 2026)

Publications

For articles submitted for publication to preprint servers or journals on or after January 1, 2026:

• HHMI scientists subject to this policy must make original research articles that represent major contributions from their laboratories publicly available as initial and revised preprints. These preprints must be deposited on a designated preprint server under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
• HHMI budgets can no longer be used to pay article processing charges at hybrid journals. HHMI budgets can continue to pay APCs at fully open access journals until further notice.
• More information

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.

NEH public access policy (in effect October 1, 2025)

Publications

• Recipients must submit a copy of the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM) to NEH for any peer-reviewed scholarly article resulting in whole or in part from award activities.
• Timing: Submit no later than the article publication date, defined here as the date the final publisher’s version is available online.

Data

• Recipients must publicly share applied or scientific research datasets produced as a result of funding from a small number of NEH programs, as described in the respective Notices of Funding Opportunity. Recipients will not submit data directly to NEH; rather, they will adhere to a Data Management and Sharing Plan (DMSP) detailing expected points of access and preservation

Data archiving plans for NIJ funding applicants (based on 2013 directive)

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 (in effect July 1, 2025)

• Authors should submit peer reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central (PMC) upon acceptance for publication. Find submission instructions on the NIH website.
• NIH updated its manuscript submission interface in May 2026 to help reviewers apply the correct (zero) embargo period to papers. This is relevant especially if a publisher submits manuscripts to PMC on behalf of authors.
• 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.

Data

Updated 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 (based on 2013 directive)

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 implementation (updated and in effect January 22, 2026)

Publications

• Submit final peer-reviewed, author accepted manuscripts (AAM) for journal articles and juried conference papers to the NSF Public Access Repository at or before the time of publication.
• Deposit of AAMs into PAR fulfills NSF public access requirements for publications and does not require payment of special fees to publishers or other third parties. Special fees for the purpose of making published versions of record (VORs) publicly accessible are allowable costs but such payments are not required for deposits of AAM into PAR.
• These deposits are required for the articles to be included as part of the annual project reporting process.
• Submit via Research.gov.

Data

• Datasets underlying peer-reviewed scholarly publications should be made publicly available as per the Data Management and Sharing Plan (See PAPPG Chapter II.D.2.i(ii)) of the associated award.
• Proposals must include a DMSP created using the tool implemented on Research.gov.
• Exceptions to sharing data supporting NSF funded publications at the time of publication must be described and justified within the DMSP.

Smithsonian public access policy (in effect for intramural awards January 2025)

USDA public access policy (in effect April 7, 2026)

Publications

• Submit accepted manuscripts to the USDA public access archive system (PubAg) “as soon as possible after acceptance, and no later than the date on which the publisher makes the final published article available online.”

Data

• Data management plans required, focusing on digital data underlying the conclusions of peer-reviewed scientific research publications.
• Data should be made publicly accessible to the extent practicable.

USGS public access plan (in effect December 31, 2025)

Publications

• All accepted manuscripts must be deposited in the internal USGS Information Product Data System (IPDS) repository.
• Articles are made publicly available free-of-charge by the publisher or the accepted manuscript archived in IPDS is made publicly available through the USGS Publications Warehouse at the time of publication.
• Bureau-approved USGS series publications are released through the USGS Publications Warehouse immediately upon publication and are provided in a machine-readable format.

Data

• All data associated with a scholarly publication and the supporting data collected by the project will be made available free-of-charge for public access, unless the Bureau determines that a demonstrated circumstance restricts the data from being made publicly available.
• Data management plans (DMPs) must be part of the approved USGS project plans.