Guidance for Public Access to Federally Funded Research

We are committed to supporting CU Boulder researchers to provide public access to research outputs. Please contact us if you have questions or suggestions about how we can better support making your research freely and openly available.

Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Public Access Memorandum

In August 2022, the OSTP at the White House issued a memorandum calling on federal agencies to make “articles resulting from all U.S. federally funded research freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.”

Key elements of this new guidance

  • Immediate access to federally funded research articles with no embargo. Previous guidance recommended a 12-month post-publication embargo.
  • Immediate public access to scientific data. Data was not included in the previous recommendations.
  • All U.S. federal agencies are included in the new guidance. Previous guidance only applied to agencies with annual R&D budgets over $100 million.
  • New provisions for improving scientific research integrity, such as appropriate metadata, and persistent identifiers, and for reducing inequities in publishing and access amongst underserved populations and early career researchers.

How this affects you and your research

CU Boulder campus leadership has expressed broad support for the new policy guidance.

All federal agencies must have a policy in place by December 31, 2025. Researchers should consult funding agencies about expectations, but here are some general recommendations:

  1. Include publication costs and costs associated with submission, curation, and management of data in your research budgets
  2. Obtain an ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID)
  3. Acquire DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for your data sets and start depositing them in CU Scholar. We can help you with this - contact crdds@colorado.edu.

As funding agencies provide updated requirements, this page will be updated to provide more detailed recommendations and support.

Additional Resources

Last updated January 2023