US Science Agencies to Mandate Papers Based on Research They Fund to be Freely Available Online Within 12 Months of Journal Publication. (February 25, 2013)

A six page directive from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is headed:

The OSTP in introducing the directive states:

The Obama Administration is committed to the proposition that citizens deserve easy access to the results of scientific research their tax dollars have paid for. That’s why, in a policy memorandum released today, OSTP Director John Holdren has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research. OSTP has been looking into this issue for some time, soliciting broad public input on multiple occasions and convening an interagency working group to develop a policy. The final policy reflects substantial inputs from scientists and scientific organizations, publishers, members of Congress, and other members of the public—over 65 thousand of whom recently signed a We the People petition asking for expanded public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research.

Those federal agencies that are affected, which includes the National Science Foundation (NSF) are directed to submit draft plans within 6 months "which must contain the following elements:"

Myron Gutmann, head of NSF's social, behavioural, and economic sciences directorate, told ScienceInsider that some NSF divisions are "experimenting with things," but that officially NSF doesn't have any agency-wide plan in the works. "You could imagine an approach with a repository like PubMed Central; you could imagine a distributed approach with a database linking to outside things. You could imagine a hybrid. But we haven't gotten that far," Gutmann says. Catherine Woteki, undersecretary for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Research, Education, and Economics division, says her agency hopes to learn from NIH's experience with PubMed Central.  she says, "There is software we might be able to adapt for our purposes".

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition Executive Director Heather Joseph also told  ScienceIndiser it is noteworthy that papers are to be made available in a way that allows for text mining, or searching full text and data. At the same time, the directive falls short of a bill introduced this month in the House of Representatives called the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR); it would make federally funded research papers available after just 6 months. "FASTR is better," Joseph says. But "all things being equal, this [the OSTP directive] is an enormous step forward by this administration."