“The US’ Office of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy Pol­icy (OSTP) has launched a pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion on its Pub­lic Access Pol­icy. The Admin­is­tra­tion is seek­ing pub­lic input on access to publicly-funded research results, such as those that appear in aca­d­e­mic and schol­arly jour­nal arti­cles. Cur­rently, the National Insti­tutes of Health (NIH) require that research funded by its grants be made avail­able to the pub­lic online at no charge within 12 months of pub­li­ca­tion. The Admin­is­tra­tion is seek­ing views as to whether this pol­icy should be extended to other sci­ence agen­cies and, if so, how it should be implemented.

OSTP launched an inter­ac­tive, online dis­cus­sion on Decem­ber 10. The dis­cus­sion is focused on three major areas of inter­est. These include: Imple­men­ta­tion (Dec. 10 to 20): Which Fed­eral agen­cies are good can­di­dates to adopt pub­lic access poli­cies? What vari­ables (field of sci­ence, pro­por­tion of research funded by pub­lic or pri­vate enti­ties, etc.) should affect how pub­lic access is imple­mented at var­i­ous agen­cies, includ­ing the max­i­mum length of time between pub­li­ca­tion a pub­lic release?; Fea­tures and Tech­nol­ogy (Dec. 21 to 31): In what for­mat should the data be sub­mit­ted in order to make it easy to search and retrieve infor­ma­tion, and to make it easy for oth­ers to link to it? Are there exist­ing dig­i­tal stan­dards for archiv­ing and inter­op­er­abil­ity to max­imise pub­lic ben­e­fit? How are these antic­i­pated to change; and Man­age­ment (Jan. 1 to 7): What are the best mech­a­nisms to ensure com­pli­ance? What would be the best met­rics of suc­cess? What are the best exam­ples of usabil­ity in the pri­vate sec­tor (both domes­tic and inter­na­tional)? Should those who access papers be given the oppor­tu­nity to com­ment or pro­vide feedback?

Each of these top­ics will form the basis of a blog post­ing that will appear at www.whitehouse.gov/open and will be open for com­ment on the OSTP blog.

Search for more Pub­lic funded research infor­ma­tion in K-Store”

Source: Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter