Today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) updated U.S. policy guidance to make the results of taxpayer-supported research immediately available to the American public at no cost. In a memorandum to federal departments and agencies, Dr. Alondra Nelson, the head of OSTP, delivered guidance for agencies to update their public access policies as soon as possible to make publications and research funded by taxpayers publicly accessible, without an embargo or cost. All agencies will fully implement updated policies, including ending the optional 12-month embargo, no later than December 31, 2025.

This policy will likely yield significant benefits on a number of key priorities for the American people, from environmental justice to cancer breakthroughs, and from game-changing clean energy technologies to protecting civil liberties in an automated world.

For years, President Biden has been committed to delivering policy based on the best available science, and to working to ensure the American people have access to the findings of that research. “Right now, you work for years to come up with a significant breakthrough, and if you do, you get to publish a paper in one of the top journals,” said then-Vice President Biden in remarks to the American Association for Cancer Research in 2016. “For anyone to get access to that publication, they have to pay hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars to subscribe to a single journal. And here’s the kicker — the journal owns the data for a year. The taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research every year, but once it’s published, nearly all of that taxpayer-funded research sits behind walls. Tell me how this is moving the process along more rapidly.” The new public access guidance was developed with the input of multiple federal agencies over the course of this year, to enable progress on a number of Biden-Harris Administration priorities.

“When research is widely available to other researchers and the public, it can save lives, provide policymakers with the tools to make critical decisions, and drive more equitable outcomes across every sector of society,” said Dr. Alondra Nelson, head of OSTP. “The American people fund tens of billions of dollars of cutting-edge research annually. There should be no delay or barrier between the American public and the returns on their investments in research.”

This policy update builds on the Biden-Harris Administration’s broader efforts to broaden the potential of the American innovation ecosystem by leveling the playing field for all American innovators, which can help ensure that the U.S. remains a world leader in science and technology. This policy guidance will end the current optional embargo that allows scientific publishers to put taxpayer-funded research behind a subscription-based paywall – which may block access for innovators for whom the paywall is a barrier, even barring scientists and their academic institutions from access to their own research findings. In addition, agencies will develop plans to improve transparency, including clearly disclosing authorship, funding, affiliations, and the development status of federally funded research – and will coordinate with OSTP to help ensure equitable delivery of federally funded research results and data.

Advocates, researchers, academic libraries, Congressional leaders, and others have long called for greater public access to federally funded research results. This policy update reflects extensive public engagement with stakeholders across the research publication ecosystem on ways to strengthen equitable access to federally funded research results. OSTP’s consultations have included large and small science and academic publishers, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, libraries and universities, scholarly societies, and members of the general public.

In the short-term, agencies will work with OSTP to update their public access and data sharing plans by mid-2023. OSTP expects all agencies to have updated public access policies fully implemented by the end of 2025. This timeline gives agencies, researchers, publishers, and scholarly societies some flexibility on when to adapt to the new policies. Over the long term, OSTP will continue to coordinate with federal agencies to ensure that government public access policies adapt to new technologies and emerging needs.

A comprehensive analysis of Springer Nature’s fully open access (OA) portfolio of over 580 journals released today, shows the tangible impact publishing in these journals is having for its authors and the research communities it serves.  

Comparing available public data on fully OA portfolios from hybrid and pure OA publishers, the report shows that authors publishing in Springer Nature’s fully OA journals benefit from:

·       More people seeing and downloading their work – articles achieve on average 7000+ downloads per article, which can be up to 5x more than articles published in another publishers’ fully OA journals;

·       More people reading and using their work – an average of 7.39 citations per article, the highest of all fully OA journals across OA publishers;

·       The ability to publish in the broadest selection of fully OA journals of all publishers – titles appearing across more JCR categories (139) than any other fully OA journal publisher.

Commenting, Springer Nature’s VP Journals, Fully OA, Meredith LeMasurier commented:

“For over 20 years, we have been committed to driving a sustainable transition to OA. Since Springer became the first publisher to offer authors an OA choice on its subscription journals and BMC became part of what we now know as Springer Nature, OA has been part of our DNA. We now have many new levers at our disposal such as transformative journals and transformative agreements to help drive the transition to OA, but at the centre remains our long standing heritage of fully OA journals. 

“This report, for the first time, demonstrates the real impact of fully OA publishing at Springer Nature, and the tangible benefit that this has for our author’s globally through the use and re-use of their work.” 

Springer Nature now has a portfolio of over 580 fully OA journals across three imprints – Nature, Springer and BMC, and is also publisher for the largest fully OA scientific journal in the world, Scientific Reports, which in 2021 published over 23,000 papers making it one of the top six cited journals globally. Springer Nature continues to drive forwards OA not only through its fully OA portfolio, but also through the introduction of new routes to OA be that through its transformative agreements (TA), new fully OA journals, books and platforms, or through the development of transformative journals (TJ). Driving the opening up of research and the development of open science, remains Springer Nature’s primary focus in serving the research community with a commitment to have over 50% of all its primary research published OA by 2024.

The full report can be accessed here

More information on Springer Nature’s wider commitment to OA and our full OA offerings can be found here

In July, Clarivate announced its upcoming plan to expand the collection of journals that will now receive a journal Impact Factor (IF). Previously, although all journals indexed in Web of Science were given variable citation metrics within Clarivate’s yearly Journal Citation Reports (JCR), only journals indexed within either the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) or Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) received IFs. This will now change starting in June 2023, when all journals indexed within the Core Collection of Web of Science will receive an IF, including the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI).

As the largest open access publisher in the world with over 210 journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection, we welcome the announced changes! These changes will provide scholars with more data to better compare and assess the quality, impact and reputation of academic journals. Additionally, MDPI fully supports the mission behind these changes to better “level the playing field for all quality journals, including recently-launched journals [and] open access journals”. *

For us, this means that at least 113 additional MDPI journals will receive an Impact Factor in the June 2023 JCR, adding to the 98 MDPI journals that already have an Impact Factor.

Meanwhile, MDPI continues to support and encourage all academic journal ranking lists that provide authors with alternative metrics. We also provide various journal data on our journal statistics pages and on article pages, in order to promote our mission to continuously offer transparency around journal and article metrics and better support the needs of our authors and the academic community.

*According to “Announcing changes to the 2023 Journal Citation Reports” by Clarivate.