Grants and Government Funding

“Lyrasis, Big Ten Academic Alliance Libraries, and California Digital Library Receive Grant to Advance Diamond Open Access in the United States”

The grant will support the project Mapping U.S. Diamond Open Access Journals, which will conduct the first national mapping of Diamond Open Access (OA) publishing in the United States. Diamond OA journals are peer-reviewed publications that are free for both authors and readers and operate without commercial profit motives. The project will illuminate the decentralized U.S. landscape of Diamond OA journals, surface sector-wide challenges, and provide actionable recommendations in support of sustainable, non-commercial scholarly publishing. By identifying infrastructure, investment, and policy needs, the project aims to produce actionable recommendations to guide institutions, funders, and coalitions in creating sustainable, field-informed investments that strengthen openness and resilience in scholarly communication.

https://tinyurl.com/2vdfajk9

“How a New Data Platform Sheds Light on Open Science Funding”

TSOSI is a data platform designed to make visible which organizations have financially supported which open infrastructures. In the current beta version, it includes data provided by five infrastructures—Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), SciPost, PeerCommunityIn, and Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for the Social Sciences and Humanities (OPERAS)—revealing a small segment of the open science funding landscape. Information about the financial support these infrastructures have received was already partly available on their websites—see, for example, the supporters’ webpage of the DOAJ—but TSOSI represents an important step forward. Instead of appearing fragmented on websites, encapsulated into webpages, and without identifiers, this information is now collected on a centralized data platform where it is structured and enriched with the two key identifiers—Research Organization Registry (ROR) and Wikidata. These identifiers then permit the collection of information about organizations, such as country, geographical location, Wikipedia description, and logos.

https://tinyurl.com/2fmdee54

“Understanding and Advancing Research Software Grant Funding Models”

Research software funding currently operates across a disconnected landscape of public and private grant-making organizations, leading to inefficiencies for software projects and the broader research community. The lack of coordination forces projects to pursue multiple, often overlapping opportunities, and forces funders to independently evaluate projects and proposals, resulting in duplicated effort and suboptimal resource distribution. By examining existing collaboration models, including centralized and distributed approaches, we highlight how joint decision-making mechanisms could improve sustainability for reusable software resources. An international set of examples illustrates how cross-organization cooperation for research software funding can be structured. Such collaborations can optimize grant disbursement and align priorities. Increased collaboration could allow funders to better address the ongoing maintenance and evolution of research software, lowering barriers that hamper discovery across multiple research domains. Encouraging both bottom-up user-driven and top-down coordination mechanisms ultimately supports more robust, widely accessible research software, improving global research outcomes.

https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.20210.1

“Guest Post — From Overhead to Essential: The FAIR Model Recognizes Research Information Services as Essential to the Research Enterprise”

The current moment presents three distinct approaches to federal research funding reform for consideration by Congress. . . .

A Straight 15% Cap: The most draconian option under consideration would simply impose a uniform 15% indirect cost rate cap across all federal agencies and institution. . . .

Simplified Negotiated Rates: A second option proposes streamlined negotiated rates. . . . However, early indications suggest these simplified negotiations might eliminate recognition of research information services, folding library costs back into general administrative categories. . . .

JAG’s FAIR Model: The third option, JAG’s refined Financial Accountability in Research (FAIR) Model. . . . Rather than treating research support as undifferentiated overhead, FAIR explicitly recognizes Research Information Services (“project-specific costs related to journal subscriptions, database access, institutional repositories, and related resources”) as Essential Research Performance Support. . . .

https://tinyurl.com/yeyvas69

“NIH to Crack Down on Excessive Publisher Fees for Publicly Funded Research”

The current landscape of scholarly publishing presents growing challenges. Some major publishers charge as much as $13,000 per article for immediate open access, while also collecting substantial subscription fees from government agencies. For example, one publishing group reportedly receives more than $2 million annually in subscription fees from NIH, in addition to tens of millions more through exclusive article processing charges (APCs). These costs ultimately burden taxpayers who have already funded the underlying research.

To address this imbalance, NIH will introduce a cap on allowable publication costs starting in Fiscal Year (FY) 2026, ensuring that publication fees remain reasonable across the research ecosystem. The policy aims to curb excessive APCs and ensure the broad dissemination of research findings without unnecessary financial barriers.

https://tinyurl.com/4uh6v67m

“Scoop: Trump Admin Cuts Contracts with Scientific Publishing Giant”

The Trump administration has terminated millions worth of funding for Springer Nature, a German-owned scientific publishing giant that has long received payments for subscriptions from National Institutes of Health and other agencies, Axios has learned.

https://tinyurl.com/yww23ks8

“Guest Post: Will JAG’s New Models Give Libraries and Publishers a Better Seat at the Federal Funding Table?”

On June 12, the Council on Governmental Relations (COGR) hosted a town hall webinar on behalf of JAG [Joint Associations Group]. The group of subject matter experts, with an eye to American leadership in science and technology, presented two provisional models for reforming indirect cost reimbursement. Described as “bookends,” the two recommendations represent the ends of a spectrum, leaving open the possibility of a hybrid model somewhere in between.

Both models aim to eliminate frequent indirect cost rate negotiations while ensuring taxpayer accountability for research investments. They also attempt to increase transparency, reduce administrative burdens, and provide more accurate accounting of recoverable costs.

https://tinyurl.com/yn48c7wj

Plan S: Annual Review 2024

Plan S is a funder-led initiative to promote Open Access (OA) publishing. The funders endorsing Plan S – united in cOAlition S – require that from 2021 scientific publications that result from research funded by their grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms. . . .

The data consistently shows that over the past four years, OA levels have continued to rise, with more than four-fifths of the articles attributed to cOAlition S funders being available as OA in 2024. . . .

The key observation is that over the last three years, cOAlition S funders have consistently maintained OA rates near or over 80%, whereas the global OA average is around 56%. . . .

The “Gold” route remains the most widely used method for delivering OA amongst cOAlition S-funded researchers, with 41% of all articles published OA in 2024 made available this way. . . .

The number of articles made available via the “Hybrid” route has increased, likely due to the transformative arrangements, such as Read and Publish agreements and transformative journals . . .

In 2024, cOAlition S played a major role in the advancement of Diamond OA in Europe and beyond. Within Europe, the results of the EC-funded DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA projects, in which cOAlition S participates, were folded into the developing structure of the European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH).

https://tinyurl.com/4u3bk7b4

“News & Views Special Edition: How Much Scholarly Publishing Is Affected by Us Presidential Executive Orders?”

If federal agencies are being instructed to withhold or withdraw submissions, then, to quantify what this might mean to publishers, we have estimated the volume of output from a few key federal agencies? . . . .

The data span the previous 5 years.

The US accounted for around 15% of global output.

The CDC accounted for a tiny share: 0.1% of global output and 0.6% of US output.

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), of which the CDC is a part, accounted for just under 6% of global output, but just over 40% of US output.

The NIH produces around 95% of DHHS output.

https://tinyurl.com/yr44kt7k

"A Decade of Open Access Policy at the Gates Foundation Based on Experimentation, Evidence and Evolution"

This article provides an in-depth look at the Gates Foundation’s open access (OA) policy journey as 2025 marks a decade of OA policy for the foundation. There have been two iterations of the policy – the original version that was launched in 2015 with a focus on gold OA, and which was then adapted in 2021 to reflect the Plan S principles, including limitations for publisher payments based on journal type and repository deposits. Now, in response to the ever-evolving needs of the scholarly ecosystem, the foundation is updating its policy again to strive for broader impact and to support practices that drive greater inclusion of scientists around the world, particularly those from low- and middle-income countries. This article will provide a deep dive into the decisions and data used to define a more equitable approach to dissemination of the research funded by the foundation.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.690

NIH Plan to Increase Findability and Transparency of Research Results Through the Use of Metadata and Persistent Identifiers

In this Plan, NIH presents a combination of efforts that are already underway and planned efforts that will increase the findability of research outputs and promote transparency in the research process, ultimately bolstering the impact of NIH’s research while fostering trust in the research that NIH supports. This Plan also addresses expectations from the fourth section of the 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) Memorandum on Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research (the 2022 OSTP Memo) and is an update to section IV, “Mechanisms to Increase Findability and Transparency of Research” of the NIH Plan to Enhance Public Access to the Results of NIH-Supported Research. Specifically, NIH is outlining how researchers and institutions should use metadata to consistently identify themselves and their research outputs, as well as requirements for NIH-supported (i.e., both NIH-funded and NIH-managed) repositories to collect and make relevant metadata publicly available and searchable. These efforts are informed by NIH’s experience in managing and hosting repositories and are intended to increase the findability and usability of all NIH research.

https://tinyurl.com/3xbrpw2r

2024 NIH Public Access Policy

This document is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on 12/18/2024 and available online at https://federalregister.gov/d/2024-29929, and on https://govinfo.gov. . . .

The Policy includes relevant language about NIH’s rights to make Author Accepted Manuscripts available in PubMed Central without embargo upon the Official Date of Publication. NIH reiterates that this does not mean that NIH has rights to the Final Published Article, as defined in the Policy, but only to the Author Accepted Manuscript, as defined in the Policy.

The Policy also requires that those depositing Author Accepted Manuscripts in PubMed Central agree to a revised Manuscript Submission Statement reiterating NIH’s right to post such Author Accepted Manuscripts without embargo upon the Official Date of Publication. The language for this statement, as included in the Guidance on Government Use License and Rights, has been modified from the Draft Public Access Policy to remove the phrase “create derivative works.” Because NIH had not intended the language to convey what comments suggested regarding the potential to compromise scientific integrity, NIH has removed the phrase. NIH will, however, continue using features, existing or to-be-developed, that ensure accessibility and usability. NIH also reserves the right to, in the future, reasonably interpret statutory and/or regulatory language to permit uses of content that are consistent with copyright law, that provide value to users, and that are considered to be in line with practices of the time.

Regarding comments that proposed NIH should provide the public with full reuse rights through explicit language about reuse of the work for any purpose with attribution, NIH notes that such language is akin to authors providing NIH with a particular license. As stated in the NIH Draft Public Access Policy, NIH does not believe that a particular license is needed to achieve the Policy’s goals.

Finally, NIH clarifies that the Policy does not prevent authors from depositing their Author Accepted Manuscripts into institutional repositories, as long as Author Accepted Manuscripts are also deposited in PubMed Central per the Policy.

https://tinyurl.com/5948sv6n

"PLOS Receives $3.3M Grant to Support Open Access Publishing & Business Model Transformation"

PLOS has been awarded a $3.3million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, underscoring its commitment to pioneer a shift away from traditional publishing models. The 3-year funding package from the Gates Foundation will support PLOS’ transition towards APC-free publishing by enabling authors, funded by the foundation, to publish with PLOS without facing APC barriers, and to contribute to open access publishing options for authors who do not have access to funding. This 3-year grant offers support while PLOS is actively working on new publishing models grounded in open science starting with an ongoing research & design project.

The grant will also support improvements to enhance the capture and dissemination of funding metadata and to experiment with the posting of peer reviews alongside preprints during the evaluation process, promoting greater transparency in scholarly communication.

https://tinyurl.com/3a79595s

"cOAlition S Announces the Release of an Independent Study on the Impact of Plan S"

The authors of the study highlight that Plan S has opened new avenues for achieving full and immediate Open Access, successfully placing Open Access high on policymakers’ agendas and bringing publishers to the negotiating table with institutions. The study underscores the potentially game-changing effect of the rights retention strategy, which institutions have since expanded into their own Rights Retention Policies. It also notes the contribution to the current momentum around Diamond Open Access, and the role of cOAlition S in raising awareness of the inequities of article-based charges publishing models.

The authors note that it may be too early to fully assess Plan S’s quantitative impact, as many policies only took effect in 2021 or later, and they recommend revisiting the study in 5-10 years. However, observing significant progress in the push towards full and immediate Open Access since Plan S was first announced and the influential role of the alliance of research funders, they recommend continuing cOAlition S beyond 2025.

https://tinyurl.com/2ecyu8ce

Report

"Changes to Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Plan Progress Reporting and the Submission of Revised DMS Plans Are Coming on October 1"

On October 1, NIH is adding several new Data Management and Sharing (DMS) questions to Research Performance Progress Reports (RPPRs) and updating the process for submitting revised DMS Plans to NIH for review. In brief:

As mentioned in a May 2024 Guide Notice, NIH is including several new questions about DMS activities in RPPRs submitted on or after October 1, 2024 (See Guide Notice NOT-OD-24-175). For awards for which the NIH DMS Policy applies, recipients will now be asked:

Whether data has been generated or shared to date

What repositories any data was shared to and under what unique digital identifier

If data has not been generated and/or shared per the award’s DMS Plan, why and what corrective actions have or will be taken to comply with the plan

If significant changes to the DMS Plan are anticipated in the coming year, recipients will be asked to explain them and provide a revised DMS Plan for approval.

NIH is updating the processes for submitting requests to revise a DMS Plan through the Just in Time (JIT) Module, the Prior Approval Module, and the RPPR Module in eRA Commons (See Guide Notice NOT-OD-24-176).

https://tinyurl.com/4mxwtn8k

cOAlition S: "Pricing Framework to Foster Global Equity in Scholarly Publishing"

cOAlition S is pleased to announce the release of a new pricing framework designed to foster global equity in scholarly publishing. Developed by Information Power following consultation with the funder, library/consortium, and publisher communities, the framework is introduced to enable discussion, promote greater transparency and inspire publishers and other service providers to implement more equitable pricing across different economies. To support this, the framework provides users with guiding principles, data, information, and tools. The approach is adaptable, allowing publishers to implement changes gradually and in line with their specific circumstances. It can be applied to various pricing models, including article processing charges (APCs), subscriptions, and transformative agreements.

Global differentiated pricing that fosters equity is:

Part of a broader commitment to equity, inclusion, diversity, and belonging.

Aligned ideally with a single consistent approach developed in meaningful, open, and transparent consultation with the research community.

Relative to the context of each country, including income and purchasing power.

Communicated clearly, easy to understand, and transparent to all.

Transparently based on independent, open datasets that are regularly updated and that can be accessed, validated, and reused by everyone.

Based on shared risk. Customers and publishers should share currency risks.

Key features of the framework include:

Open, Transparent Data: Utilizing World Bank International Comparison Program data, reflecting each country’s income and ability to pay.

Banding: Grouping countries into bands eases administration.

Excel-Based Tool: Allowing publishers to explore and set their own bands and differential prices using the same transparent data.

Local Currencies: Issuing invoices in local currencies where possible.

Comprehensive Appendices: Detailed guidance on data sources, downloading World Bank datasets, and changes in country indices from 2017 to 2021.

The full report on the Pricing Framework to Foster Global Equity in Scholarly Publishing is available for download at https://zenodo.org/uploads/12784905, along with the More Equitable Pricing Tool and a set of frequently asked questions.

https://tinyurl.com/2jf7z43v

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