Grants and Government Funding

Updated Report to the U.S. Congress on Financing Mechanisms for Open Access Publishing of Federally Funded Research

This current report elaborates on:

Implementation to advance federal public access policies. Updated agency public access policies will go into effect by December 31, 2025, in accordance with the 2022 Memorandum.

Trends in scholarly publishing since the release of the November 2023 Report, including further discussion of business models to enable public access to federally funded research, as well as domestic and global developments in advancing public access to research results.

An expansion of the analysis of estimated article processing charges paid to publish federally funded research from 2016 to 2022, with further discussion of limitations associated with calculating these charges.

Efforts to advance research integrity, including through implementation of federal public access policies and open science practices.

Continuing trends in peer review as they relate to research integrity, equity, and sustainability.

https://tinyurl.com/yryw9ejv

"NGLP [Next Generation Library Publishing] Awarded IMLS Funding to Move ‘From Pilot to Production’"

The Educopia Institute, in partnership with Open Weave Consulting, Inc., Cast Iron Coding, California Digital Library, Stratos, and Janeway, has been awarded $249,999 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to expand digital infrastructure options for library publishing programs that are open source, community-led, and grounded in academic values.

The project, to be implemented with the University of Iowa Libraries, will advance existing Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) infrastructure and service models by delivering a production-ready version of its modular, open-source display layer, Meru, that rivals proprietary publishing solutions; migrating a pilot library publisher into the NGLP ecosystem; and producing a suite of replicable tools, resources, and workflows that will enable other library publishers to follow suit. The University of Iowa Libraries will collaborate with the NGLP team to build out a production-ready instance of Meru that showcases its full publication portfolio.

https://tinyurl.com/6ajbmux8

UC and Authors Alliance: "Outcomes, Questions, and Answers: ‘The Right to Deposit (r2d) Uniform Guidance to Ensure Author Compliance and Public Access’"

The United States Office of Management and Budget uniform guidance for grants and agreements contains the following language in 2 CFR §200.315(b):

To the extent permitted by law, the recipient or subrecipient may copyright any work that is subject to copyright and was developed, or for which ownership was acquired, The Right to Deposit (R2D)under a Federal award. The Federal agency reserves a royalty-free, nonexclusive, and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work for Federal purposes and to authorize others to do so. This includes the right to require recipients and subrecipients to make such works available through agency-designated public access repositories.¹

This provision, the Federal purpose license, has existed in some form since at least 1976. Some federal agencies, including the Department of Energy (DOE), have already been relying on it in the implementation of their public access plans. The Federal purpose license applies upon creation of an article, overriding all subsequent terms and licenses. It provides a highly effective, non-disruptive, elegant and familiar solution for accomplishing the ends of the Nelson memo without having to rely on individual authors and institutions to protect this right or navigate differing institutional approaches. Leveraging the Federal purpose license could also provide consistency for articles and authors subject to policies from multiple granting agencies. . . .

If the Federal purpose license has already existed for a long time, and has new language clarifying that it can be used this way, does that solve the problem for authors?

It depends on the author’s funder. Agencies have rights in federally funded research publications, but they are not uniformly using them. Only some agencies are telling their grantees in agency guidance that the Federal purpose license covers sharing publications in agency-designated repositories. Other agencies aren’t relying on their own rights from the license, and instead advising grantees to work with their publisher and secure the rights to post their publications independently. The Federal purpose license does not help authors if they don’t know about it.

https://tinyurl.com/bdfks8pu

"NSF Invests $90M in Innovative National Scientific Cyberinfrastructure for Transforming Stem Education"

The U.S. National Science Foundation announced today a strategic investment of $90 million over five years in SafeInsights, a unique national scientific cyberinfrastructure aimed at transforming learning research and STEM education. Funded through the Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure Level-2 program (Mid-scale RI-2), SafeInsights is led by OpenStax at Rice University, who will oversee the implementation and launch of this new research infrastructure project of unprecedented scale and scope.

SafeInsights aims to serve as a central hub, facilitating research coordination and leveraging data across a range of major digital learning platforms that currently serve tens of millions of U.S. learners across education levels and science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

With its controlled and intuitive framework, unique privacy-protecting approach and emphasis on the inclusion of students, educators and researchers from diverse backgrounds, SafeInsights will enable extensive, long-term research on the predictors of effective learning, which are key to academic success and persistence. . . .

Because progress in science, technology and innovation increasingly relies on advanced research infrastructure — including equipment, cyberinfrastructure, large-scale datasets and skilled personnel — this Mid-scale RI-2 investment will allow researchers to delve into deeper and broader scientific inquiries than ever before.

https://tinyurl.com/2pps983j

Award Abstract

"Gates Open Access Policy Refresh Increases Compliance Burden and Eliminates Financial Support "

Broadly considered, the only grantees who are genuinely free to publish where they wish are those with other funding sources besides Gates with which to pay publication fees. Grantees who do not have other funds will not be able to publish in subscription journals that charge publishing fees or in fully open access journals that charge an APC. . . .

Grantees who do not have other funding sources to pay publication fees will need to identify journals that do not charge a fee to publish open or that do not charge any fees to publish a non-open article. But, it cannot be assumed that such journals will consider a manuscript that asserts the mandated rights retention statement (RRS): "Under the grant conditions of the Foundation, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License has already been assigned to the Author Accepted Manuscript version that might arise from this submission."

https://tinyurl.com/4mjctu2u

COMMUNIA: "New Policy Paper on Access to Publicly Funded Research"

Today, COMMUNIA is releasing Policy Paper #17 on access to publicly funded research (also available as a PDF file), in which we propose a targeted intervention in European copyright law to improve access to publicly funded research. . ..

We recommend a three-tiered approach to open publicly funded research outputs to the public, immediately upon publication, where a secondary publication obligation co-exists with a secondary publication right. We consider that an obligation by the funding recipients to republish is a more consequential approach to protect the public interest, as it makes Open Access (OA) mandatory, ultimately ensuring that publicly funded research outputs are republished in OA repositories. A right is, however, necessary to ensure that the authors, and subsequently the funding recipients, retain the rights necessary to comply with the obligation. A right also provides a legal framework for the dissemination in OA repositories of publicly funded research outputs published before the entry into force of a secondary publication obligation.

In addition, we recommend the introduction of a copyright exception for the benefit of knowledge institutions, such as libraries and archives, to further support the task of making available research outputs published before the entry into force of secondary publication rights and obligations.

https://tinyurl.com/5yuaet4v

"Is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s New OA Policy the Start of a Shift towards Preprints?"

Whether a more decoupled ecosystem emerges will depend on other funders. Will key funders like Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and Wellcome Trust follow Gates? Up until now they have made supportive noises about preprints but stopped short of mandates. Both are supporters of Plan S though, and frankly Plan S 2.0 looks a lot like Plan U. And what of the elephant in the room, National Institutes of Health (NIH)? The recent OSTP memo requires US-government-funded articles to be made free, but does not provide additional funds. If government agencies like NIH were to decide preprints qualify, as bioRxiv and arXiv have suggested, authors would have an easy path to making articles free that doesn’t require them to find an extra $5-10K behind the couch to cover APCs.

https://tinyurl.com/2t7z39vf

"VeriXiv Supports Gates-Funded Researchers to Comply with New Open Access Policy"

F1000 and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced plans to launch a new verified preprint platform that will enable the rapid availability of new findings and promote research integrity. VeriXiv [pronounced very-kive] will support researchers in complying with the Gates Foundation’s refreshed open access policy that requires all their funded research to be made available as a preprint from January 2025. . . .

Twenty different ethics and integrity checks will assess a range of issues, including plagiarism, image manipulation, author verification and competing interests. In addition, open research transparency checks will check whether the data is available in an appropriate repository and that methods have been included to support reproducibility. Each preprint will have clear labelling so that readers know the level of verification conducted on the article, and which levels have been passed.

https://www.f1000.com/verixiv/

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Ends APC Support and Requires Preprints

For over a decade, our foundation has championed transparency, access, and equity in scholarly publishing by working with publishers and journals to develop more open and accessible research publishing practices. But our quest for a truly equitable and inclusive scholarly publishing ecosystem remains incomplete. Today, we’re announcing a refreshed policy for our grantees that we hope will help foundation-supported breakthroughs reach the field in the fastest and fairest way possible.

At its core, the policy will:

End the foundation’s payment of individual article publishing fees such as APCs—paving the way for more equitable publishing models

Require grantees to share preprints of their articles—breaking free from journal constraints while prioritizing access to research and preserving grantee publishing choices

https://tinyurl.com/mtba833c

"Plan S and Open Access (OA) in Quebec: What Does the Revised FRQ OA Policy Mean for Researchers?"

Our article examines the effects of Quebec’s provincial funding agency (FRQ)’s revised 2022 OA policy on researchers. Following FRQ’s participation as a cOAlition S funding agency, which involves endorsing Plan S principles, we provide an overview of the OA options for researchers. We examine these options under the FRQ 2019 and FRQ 2022 policy years, account for the effect of transformative agreements (TA) on OA publishing options, as well as the financial implications for researchers under the revised policy.

https://tinyurl.com/2wvt5bhj

"Plan S: Annual Review 2023"

Plan S is an initiative for Open Access (OA) publishing, which requires that from 2021 scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms. . . .

In this annual review, we provide an overview of our activities in 2023, along with the latest advancements in our policies. Furthermore, we delineate ongoing initiatives that will significantly influence our future steps. The review sheds light also on specific actions taken by cOAlition S funders in the realm of scholarly communication.

http://tinyurl.com/5n8nkc7y

"UKRI [UK Research and Innovation] Monograph Open Access Policy Coming Soon: Here’s What You Need to Know"

The core requirements are:

The final Version of Record or Author’s Accepted Manuscript must be free to view and download via an online publication platform, publisher’s website, or institutional or subject repository within a maximum of 12 months of publication

The OA version of the publication must have a Creative Commons licence, with an Open Government Licence (OGL) also permitted.

Images, illustrations, tables and other supporting content should be included in the OA version where possible (third-party materials DO NOT require a CC licence)….

The UKRI allocates £8 billion of taxpayers’ money annually to support research and innovation.

https://tinyurl.com/mrxrna84

"NEH Announces New Research Initiative: Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence"

NEH’s Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence initiative will support numerous AI-related humanities projects through the following funding opportunities:

Universities or independent research organizations considering establishing a research center that focuses on humanistic AI research should consider NEH’s newest grant program, Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence. This funding opportunity offers up to $750,000 to support the creation of humanities research centers focusing on the ethical, legal, or societal implications of artificial intelligence.

Individual scholars or scholarly teams based at an institution (e.g., colleges and universities) may consider Dangers and Opportunities of Technology: Perspectives from the Humanities. Independent scholars or those affiliated with an institution may apply to Fellowships, Awards for Faculty at HBCUs, HSIs, and TCUs, Summer Stipends, or Public Scholars.

Collaborative teams interested in planning for an international AI research project or hosting a scholarly convening about AI should consider Collaborative Research.

Institutions interested in hosting professional development programs on the latest research related to humanistic AI should consider Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities.

https://tinyurl.com/c5sb7x26

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Paywall: "The New Information Retrieval Problem: Data Availability"

In this paper, we discuss a method for exploring and locating datasets made available by scientists from federally funded projects in the US. The data pathways method was tested on federal awards. Here we describe the method and the results from analyzing fifty federal awards granted by the National Science Foundation to pursue data resources and their availability in publications, data repositories, or institutional repositories. The data pathways approach contributes to the development of a practical approach on availability that captures the current ways in which data are accessible from federally funded science projects –ranging from institutional repositories, journal data deposit, PI and project web pages, and science data platforms, among other found possibilities

https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.796

"CLIR Announces Call for Submissions: Grants for Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives Awards"

The program’s objective is to encourage proposals for the digitization of materials that enrich the public’s understanding of the histories of underrepresented communities, particularly those of people of color and other marginalized populations. These are communities and perspectives that have not received adequate recognition or attention. . . .

CLIR will award grants ranging from $50,000 to $300,000 in the local currency of the recipient organizations. The awarded projects are scheduled to begin on January 1, 2025. . . .

The application process has two stages. The initial application is open to eligible nonprofit collecting organizations located in the United States and Canada. Deadline for submission of proposals is set for 11:59 pm ET on November 1, 2023. During this stage, applicants are encouraged to effectively communicate the significance of the materials and the need for support through this grant. The program’s independent review panel will then select applicants whose initial proposals align closely with the program’s scope and reflect its core values. These selected applicants will be invited to submit a final proposal in early 2024.

https://tinyurl.com/3h9xh32r

"ARL Awarded Grant to Continue Research on Institutional Expenses for Public Access to Research Data"

The US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), in collaboration with Duke University, the University of Minnesota, and Washington University in St. Louis, all of whom are members of the Data Curation Network (DCN), a $741,921 National Leadership Grant to examine institutional expenses for public access to research data. This research builds upon ARL’s existing Realities of Academic Data Sharing initiative.

https://tinyurl.com/378dzab6

"Association of Research Libraries and California Digital Library Receive Grant to Advance Data Management and Sharing"

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the California Digital Library (CDL) have received a $668,048 National Leadership Grant from the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to assist institutions in managing and sharing federally funded research data. This project will build a machine-actionable data-management plan (maDMP) tool by enhancing and developing new DMPTool features utilizing persistent identifiers (PIDs). CDL and ARL will work together to further strengthen institutional capacity for tracking research outputs by piloting the institutional integration of maDMPs across an academic campus and building community across institutions for maDMPs.

https://tinyurl.com/35x9d45z

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"New at Dryad: Support for NIH-funded researchers"

Dryad provides a simple submission process that makes it easy for researchers to upload your datasets, apply metadata that makes them discoverable and reusable, and get a persistent identifier (DOI) you can use in grant reporting. Once submitted, datasets are made publicly accessible so they can be reused by others in order to advance scientific discovery and collaboration across disciplines. Dryad also provides an extensive library of existing datasets from various sources, including those funded by NIH grants, that are completely free to access and reuse.

https://tinyurl.com/4uu9tz2r

"Mellon Foundation Funds Digitizing Hidden Collections and Archives: Amplifying Unheard Voices"

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has been granted a $5,000,000 award from the Mellon Foundation to bolster the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Amplifying Unheard Voices regranting program and related operations. . . .

The forthcoming call, Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Amplifying Unheard Voices, is set to create a groundbreaking opportunity for eligible nonprofit organizations in the US and Canada to digitize materials in any format. By providing essential funding to a diverse cohort of academic, independent, and community-based organizations, CLIR seeks to unlock access to previously unavailable or underutilized collections. This move is expected to foster broader recognition of the immense value in preserving resources that document the history of marginalized people to the advancement of social justice.

https://tinyurl.com/22nkn5at

CNRS: "Publication Costs — ‘We Are on the Edge of the Abyss’"

Alain Schuhl, the Deputy CEO for Science at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS):

A recent prospective study in France run by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research reported that France paid almost €30 million in APCs in 2020. The same study suggests that at this rate of increase France could be paying €50 million in APCs by 2030 or even nearly €200 million [about $219,907,000] if all scientific publications have switched to the author-pays model by then. This amount is far higher than the budget of the subscription-based model which is already excessively expensive.

https://tinyurl.com/3xfkz79h

"The MIT Press Receives $10 Million Endowment Gift for Open Access to Knowledge"

The new fund will support the MIT Press’s ground-breaking efforts to publish open access books and journals in fields ranging from science and technology to the social sciences, arts, and humanities. It will also help the MIT Press continue to develop tools, models, and resources that make scholarship more accessible to researchers and other readers around the world. . . .

Arcadia is providing an outright endowment gift of $5 million, as well as a $5 million “challenge” gift to incentivize other funders by matching their support of MIT’s open publishing activities.

https://bit.ly/3B5SWKb

"AUPresses Receives NEH Grant to Study Impact of Open Access on Print Sales"

The project seeks to understand empirically whether the availability of OA editions of scholarly books has a quantifiable effect on the sales performance of print editions. While many university presses have pursued experiments with OA publishing, sustainable financing of high-quality, rigorous scholarly publishing operations is a significant concern. The study will look at both OA and traditionally published titles across multiple disciplines from many presses. Findings from the study will be shared publicly in support of scholarly publishers, peer institutions, and associations devoted to humanities scholarship.

"How Open Access Diamond Journals Comply with Industry Standards Exemplified by Plan S Technical Requirements"

Purpose:

This study investigated how well current open access (OA) diamond journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and a survey conform to Plan S requirements, including licenses, peer review, author copyright, unique article identifiers, digital archiving, and machine-readable licenses.

Method:

Data obtained from DOAJ journals and surveyed journals from mid-June to mid-July 2020 were analyzed for a variety of Plan S requirements. The results were presented using descriptive statistics.

Results:

Out of 1,465 journals that answered, 1,137 (77.0%) reported compliance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) principles. The peer review types used by OA diamond journals were double-blind (6,339), blind (2,070), peer review (not otherwise specified, 1,879), open peer review (42), and editorial review (118) out of 10,449 DOAJ journals. An author copyright retention policy was adopted by 5,090 out of 10,448 OA diamond journals (48.7%) in DOAJ. Of the unique article identifiers, 5,702 (54.6%) were digital object identifiers, 58 (0.6%) were handles, and 14 (0.1%) were uniform resource names, while 4,675 (44.7%) used none. Out of 1,619 surveyed journals, the archiving solutions were national libraries (n=170, 10.5%), Portico (n=67, 4.1%), PubMed Central (n=15, 0.9%), PKP PN (n=91, 5.6%), LOCKSS (n=136, 8.4%), CLOCKSS (n=87, 5.4%), the National Computing Center for Higher Education (n=6, 0.3%), others (n=69, 4.3%), no policy (n=855, 52.8%), and no reply (n=123, 7.6%). Article-level metadata deposition was done by 8,145 out of 10,449 OA diamond journals (78.0%) in DOAJ.

Conclusion:

OA diamond journals’ compliance with industry standards exemplified by the Plan S technical requirements was insufficient, except for the peer review type.

https://doi.org/10.6087/kcse.295

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"Analysis of U.S. Federal Funding Agency Data Sharing Policies: 2020 Highlights and Key Observations "

Federal funding agencies in the United States (U.S.) continue to work towards implementing their plans to increase public access to funded research and comply with the 2013 Office of Science and Technology memo Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research. In this article we report on an analysis of research data sharing policy documents from 17 U.S. federal funding agencies as of February 2021. Our analysis is guided by two questions: 1.) What do the findings suggest about the current state of and trends in U.S. federal funding agency data sharing requirements? 2.) In what ways are universities, institutions, associations, and researchers affected by and responding to these policies? Over the past five years, policy updates were common among these agencies and several themes have been thoroughly developed in that time; however, uncertainty remains around how funded researchers are expected to satisfy these policy requirements.

http://www.ijdc.net/article/view/791

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"cOAlition S Confirms the End of Its Financial Support for Open Access Publishing under Transformative Arrangements after 2024"

Plan S was launched in 2018. At that time, cOAlition S recognised that transformative arrangements would provide a useful means to repurpose funds for journal subscriptions to publication fees, thus supporting legacy publishers in transforming paywalled to Open Access publication models. It was, however, also clear that the transformation would have to be completed at a definite point in time, by the end of 2024 at the latest. We maintain this timeline. We believe that the strategy of providing financial support for these arrangements—endorsed by many cOAlition S members—beyond 2024 would significantly increase the risk that these arrangements will become permanent and perpetuate hybrid Open Access, which cOAlition S has always firmly opposed.

bit.ly/3Y2l8He

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