The Grand Compromise of U.S. Public Access Programs: Going Green

Authors

Jeffrey Salmon, US DOE Office of Science

Date of this Version

9-2016

Document Type

Article

Citation

Published on OSTI, US Dept of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (https://www.osti.gov) Home > The Grand Compromise of U.

https://www.osti.gov/us-public-access-programs-going-green

Comments

US government work.

Dr. Jeffrey Salmon is Deputy Director for Resource Management in the Department of Energy Office of Science.

Abstract

We at the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) have found that providing full public access to the research DOE funds is simple in principle and complex in practice. ... [W]e can say that a great deal of progress has been made toward reaching the goal of free public access it sets out. And much of that progress is due to hard collaborative work by both the government and publishers. Following the February 2013 memo from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research [3],” all major U.S. federal science agencies are now implementing public access plans, which comprehend both publications and data. DOE was the first federal agency to gain OSTP approval of its plan – in July 2014. DOE’s early implementation is a result of the longstanding scientific and technical information (STI) program and infrastructure managed by OSTI since the days of the Atomic Energy Commission. OSTI has systems in place for providing public access to over 40,000 research items per year resulting from DOE’s $11 billion research and development (R&D) budget. Such outputs include technical reports, conference papers, and patents, as well as metadata for journal articles and datasets. With this infrastructure in place, implementing public access to the full text of journal articles (or the accepted manuscripts) was an incremental, not a revolutionary change. After a 12-month embargo period, or as we like to call it, “administrative interval,” the accepted manuscripts are made freely available through the OSTI-hosted DOE Public Access Gateway for Energy and ScienceBeta, or DOE PAGESBeta [4].