Invest in Open Infrastructure: “How are US Institutions Putting Public Access Into Practice? Insights From Our ‘Reasonable Costs’ Institutional Research”

From an Invest in Open Infrastructure Blog Post by Lauren Collister, Sarah Lippincott, Jennifer Kemp, Katherine E Skinner, and Gail Steinhart:

Since 2023, IOI has been working on a project with financial support from the National Science Foundation (US) titled “Investigating ‘reasonable costs’ to achieve public access to federally funded research and scientific data.” Our aim is to investigate how stakeholders, including researchers, research institutions, publishers, societies, libraries, and offices of sponsored research, are responding to guidance and forthcoming policies regarding free, immediate, and equitable access to US federally funded research and scientific data.

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Today, we are releasing the results of this collaboration in three documents:

1. “Between the Memo and the Mandate: Institutional Perspectives on Public Access Readiness”: a summary of the survey responses, including which policies and practices institutions already have in place, and what units are responsible for different actions.
2. A packet of workflows, constructed in collaboration with colleagues at each institution, illustrating a variety of approaches to sponsored project administration for different institution sizes and types. These workflows focus particularly on public access and where the conversations and interactions appear in each institution’s processes.
3. “Preparing for Public Access: Mapping Institutional Workflows for Sponsored Research Success”: a full methodology and results summary from conducting the surveys and interviews and constructing the workflows. This guide is intended to document our processes, share our findings, and provide guidance on how other institutions may replicate this process in their own contexts. This document also contains four appendices containing the text of each of the two surveys and two interviews.

Key findings 

• Infrastructure that can support public access mandates, in particular institutional repositories, is widely implemented across the US institutions we surveyed.
• Policy support at the institutional level is less widespread, for reasons that are unclear.
• More institutions provide financial support for meeting public access requirements related to publications than for research data, but this may be at least in part because many generalist and discipline-based data repositories are currently free of charge to use.
• Libraries are more likely than other campus units to report the impact of federal public access mandates as “noticeable” or “transformational.”
• The workflow construction process is a valuable one, providing visibility into how different units contributed to the overall research lifecycle.
• A key workflow intervention for reducing friction in the research lifecycle would be early connection points where researchers and principal investigators can signal a need for resources such as high performance computing, specialized data repositories, or publication assistance.

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Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Data Files, Interviews, Libraries, News, Open Access