The US Government’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is re-evaluating its policies and practices for public access to federally funded scholarly publications, data and code. As a part of this, the OSTP issued a request for information from the community.

We responded with these key points:

• The research landscape is rapidly evolving, and greater public access to publications, data and code is an important development that must be fully supported.
• Alongside greater public access to research outputs, researchers and their institutions must be properly rewarded on the basis of their overall contributions to research. For example, data and code must be treated as first-class research outputs so that researchers are fully incentivized to share them.
• Journals and other forms of high-quality publishing provide valuable services to research communities and society as a whole. The sustainability of these scholarly communication venues should be protected.
• We encourage the US Govt to take the following actions:
  • Develop strong, clear and consistent policies across all federal agencies.
  • Acknowledge that different research communities have different needs and must be able to deliver greater public access in different ways.
  • Research is an international endeavour, and therefore open research policies should be developed internationally.
  • Funding for open access must be provided, and that funding should support making the authoritative, final published versions of content open access.
  • Technology infrastructures for the sharing and preservation of data and code must be funded on a stable, long-term basis.
  • New modes of scholarly communications, including new publishing venues, should also be supported and funded.

You can read our full submission here.