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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Methodology 

As part of this work, we collaborated with 25 research institutions to understand responses across different units to these forthcoming requirements, including what processes they already had in place and their views on the needs and gaps that they were yet to address. We studied this through two surveys to each institution, followed by two structured interviews with staff in different departments that facilitate and administer sponsored projects. 

Publications

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. 
Read “Between the Memo and the Mandate”

Read “Preparing for Public Access” and Explore the Workflows

We look forward to hearing your comments and feedback on this process – and, if you are interested in conducting a similar study at your institution, we would love to hear from you! Please contact us at research@investinopen.org

What’s next? 

This project will be wrapping up in the coming months. We are grateful for the funding from the National Science Foundation to do this work and hope to continue to build on these findings in the future as public access work grows across the United States and internationally. 

We will have a webinar in August to share more of our findings, and we look forward to sharing the final pieces of this work with our participants and our readers. Subscribe to our newsletter to ensure you receive updates from the IOI team on this project and all of our research work.  

Image by micheile henderson on Unsplash.

Posted by Lauren Collister, Sarah Lippincott, Jennifer Kemp, Katherine E Skinner, Gail Steinhart