Government Directives – The Nelson Memo

In August 2022, the United States Government issued a memo to all federal funding agencies that recommends changes in funding policies to provide immediate free public access to all taxpayer funded research. This document is sometimes referred to as the “Nelson Memo” or the “White House OSTP Public Access Memo” (see https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-Access-Memo.pdf).

This represents a shift from previous policies in that:

Public access should be immediate, not subject to a 6-month to multiyear embargo period.
All government agencies have been asked to update policies, not just those providing a certain dollar amount of funds.

Key dates included in the memo are:

31 December 2024: Publication of policy plans by government funding agencies
31 December 2025: All new publishing policies effective

As plans are being formulated by funding agencies, the following are key issues that have been identified, some of which have been communicated in open letters to the OSTP:

Contract provisions between publishers and authors allowing federally-funded authors to retain the right to deposit their work in agency-designated repositories (Note that this may be facilitated by existing language in the Code of Federal Regulations 200.315b): https://sites.google.com/ucop.edu/the-right-to-deposit/statement
- See also https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-2/subtitle-A/chapter-II/part-200/subpart-D/subject-group-ECFR8feb98c2e3e5ad2/section-200.315#p-200.315%28b%29
The potential role of preprint servers in addressing provisions of the Nelson Memo: https://info.arxiv.org/about/OSTP-04-11-2023.html
Other impacts on publishing and publisher responses (chemistry): https://www.acs.org/events/all-events/the-ostp-nelson-memo-and-its-impact-on-chemistry.html
How publications will be funded

Responses by Federal Funding Agencies to the Nelson Memo have been supportive of open science and include:

Government Directives – The Nelson Memo

Publication requirements when receiving government funding.