The US Department of Defense (DoD) has released a “Plan to Establish Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research” (PDF). The plan provides details and next steps regarding the deposit of peer-reviewed journal articles and digital data resulting from intramural research, grants, and contracts as well as a timeline for implementing the plan. DoD does not expect full implementation of the plan for several years but, in the interim, the agency will launch pilot projects for voluntary submission of intramural, contract, and grant-published articles and data sets.
DoD’s repository, the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), will create and maintain a system for the long-term preservation and access to DoD-funded peer-reviewed journal literature. DTIC will also create and maintain a “catalog or locator” that identifies the location of DoD-funded publicly accessible data sets. DoD’s plan calls for a 12-month embargo for journal literature during which DTIC will link out to each article on the publisher’s website. Following the embargo period, DTIC will provide access to the article—either the author’s accepted manuscript or the final, published article, deposited by the grantee, contractor, or the DoD Intramural Program.
Like other agencies, DoD will a require Data Management Plan (DMP) for all agency-funded research. The DMP will describe the digital research data and how and where the data will be made available to the public. DoD will “implement a decentralized approach for storing data in public repositories.” The DMP will also describe how the data that underlies the article “will be available for discovery, retrieval, and analysis.” DoD will work with other federal agencies to provide: guidance on what to include in DMPs, sample DMPs, and guides to journal article copyright licenses. The DoD plan will “allow for inclusion of costs for data management and access in proposals.”
Bulk downloads will only be permitted through a special arrangement with DoD. In addition, DoD will develop a web-based compliance mechanism that will issue “certification tokens” to authors when submitting articles for inclusion in the DTIC repository. DoD will also consider utilizing existing federal data sources such as USAspending.gov and the Federal Procurement Data System for compliance and tracking of DoD-funded peer-reviewed journal articles and digital data sets.
Unlike other publicly released agency public access plans, DoD calls for a 24-month rulemaking process to engage all stakeholders in commenting on the DoD plan. DoD anticipates that implementation of the public access policy in grant and contract regulations will occur by the fourth quarter of FY 2016. Public access requirements will not be retroactive.
Links to the federal agency plans and policies that have been released to date are being collected on the ARL website.
