On August 25th, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a memo titled Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research. This 2022 memo builds upon the solid foundation of the 2013 OSTP memo - Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research - and was developed through many years of feedback from the public, federal agencies, researchers, libraries, publishers, and scholarly societies. The 2013 memo was a transformative policy that catalyzed a strong open science movement across the US by requiring federal agencies with research and development expenditures exceeding $100M to develop public access plans. The DOE Public Access Plan, published in 2014 in response to the OSTP memo, made DOE-funded journal articles freely available within 12 months of publication and ensured effective data management through the development of data management plans.

With the release of the 2022 memo, OSTP is updating public access policy guidance for federal agencies to ensure immediate delivery of federally funded research to the public, free of charge, and without delay. The new guidance moves from a 12-month embargo to immediate, free access to publications; ensures that publications are machine readable; provides immediate access to data underlying publications; and empowers adoption of persistent identifiers for researchers, awards, organizations, and research outputs. The new memo asks agencies that have an existing public access plan to develop or update their plans within 180 days from August 25th, 2022.

DOE is in the process of analyzing the memo's requirements and developing proposed implementation steps for inclusion in our new public access plan. Further updates will be provided by DOE through various communication channels, including to those facilities and researchers who are DOE-funded, once a new DOE Public Access Plan is completed and approved. If you have any questions, please contact us at comments@osti.gov.