The White House has instructed federal agencies to make publicly funded research freely available immediately after publication, ending a loophole that let journals put it behind a paywall for a year. The updated guidance will take effect by the end of 2025, and it expands rules first announced in 2013 but criticized as insufficient by President Joe Biden.
The new Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo on public access was released yesterday. Individual agencies must draft new policies based on it within a year, or 180 days for larger agencies. They’ll govern the specifics of the deal, but they must implement several changes, including the following:
If a peer-reviewed scholarly publication is based on federally funded…
