On Feb. 19, 2020, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) opened a new Request for Information (RFI) on Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research. This has the potential to influence policies and practices for funded researchers throughout the United States and VCU. The deadline for responses to the request for information is March 19. 

The VCU community is invited to join a SPARC  webcast on Monday, March 2 at 2 p.m. to walk through the RFI questions and potential responses. The webcast will be streamed on both campuses in James Branch Cabell Library Room 321 and Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences First Floor Conference Room. VCU Libraries is a member of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), which works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education.

In 2013, the OSTP issued a memo mandating public access to the results of federally-funded research. As a result, regulations currently require public access sharing of articles and data from grant-funded research. This new RFI could affect future regulations, so the webcast will be of interest to researchers, research strategists, and research administrators in all areas of federally funded research.

The RFI is only open for a very short time. Submissions are due into OSTP by March 16, 2020. It asks for input on 3 key questions: 

• What current limitations exist to the effective communication of research outputs (publications, data, and code) and how might communications evolve to accelerate public access while advancing the quality of scientific research? What are the barriers to and opportunities for change?
• What more can Federal agencies do to make taxpayer funded research results, including peer-reviewed author manuscripts, data, and code funded by the Federal Government, freely and publicly accessible in a way that minimizes delay, maximizes access, and enhances usability? How can the Federal Government engage with other sectors to achieve these goals?
• How would North American science leadership and competitiveness benefit from immediate access to these resources? What are potential challenges and effective approaches for overcoming them? Analyses that weigh the trade-offs of different approaches and models, especially those that provide data, will be particularly helpful.

About SPARC

VCU Libraries is one of the 240+ SPARC members, primarily academic and research libraries located in the U.S. and Canada. SPARC is a global coalition that works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education. As a catalyst for action, SPARC focuses on collaborating with other stakeholders—including authors, publishers, libraries, students, funders, policymakers and the public—to make open the default for research and education.