The Brief Discussion on the Impact of the 2022 OSTP Memo on Scholarly Publishing

Abstract

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued the public access policy guideline “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research “to require federal agencies with R&D budgets over $100 million for making research papers publicly available. In 2019, the outbreak of the infectious pandemic COVID-19, which caused the global health crisis highlighted the importance of open access. The research outputs which can be accessed immediately, freely, and publicly made great contributions to epidemic tracking and forecasting and accelerated the developments in drugs and vaccines. In 2022, OSTP issued a memorandum on” Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research”, expanding the scope of the 2013 Memorandum. The updated OSTP policy guidance expects the research outputs funded by all federal agencies can be accessed more equitably and quickly and support the government in making evidence-based decisions. In this paper, by reviewing the literature on the developments of the U.S. public access policy guidance, to recognize the difference between the two memorandums and it is hoped that libraries can have a better understanding of the global impact on scholarly publishing in the developments of the U.S. policy. Based on the literature findings and observations, this paper provides libraries with suggestions on how to respond to the global changes which are hard to ignore.

Keywords

• public access
• open access
• scholarly publishing
• transformative agreement
• apc