No. The Nelson memo does NOT impact requirements for grants already awarded. Federal agencies will be submitting their new or updated public access policies and those policies will be finalized before the end of 2024. The deadline for all public access policies to take effect is December 31, 2025. See the timeline for more information.
Note however that it is possible existing public access policies may apply to current grants if those policies were in effect at the time the grant was awarded (ex: NIH public access policy). If you are unsure of what guidelines apply to your grant, please contact your granting agency.
All federal granting agencies regardless of their research budget. The memo directs that all federal agencies with research and development expenditures will be subject to this new policy. These individual agencies will have discretion in policy development. Check Science.gov for the latest updates on agency policies.
All peer reviewed publications (this includes peer-reviewed research articles or final manuscripts published in scholarly journals, and may include peer-reviewed book chapters, editorials, and peer-reviewed conference proceedings published in other scholarly outlets that result from federally funded research), and scientific data (see page 4 of the OSTP Public Access memo).
Scientific data includes "the recorded factual material commonly accepted in the scientific community as of sufficient quality to validate and replicate research findings. Such scientific data DO NOT include laboratory notebooks, preliminary analyses, case report forms, draft of scientific papers, plans for future research, peer-reviews, communications with colleagues, or physical objects and materials, such as laboratory specimens, artifacts, or field notes."
This memo also directs federal agencies to allow for the protection of certain types of data that may be restricted for legal or ethical reasons (like personally identifiable data).
No! You do not have to publish through an open access journal or through any other publisher open access models. There are other ways to provide immediate availability and accessibility to publications and data. One such way is to share the final manuscript in a repository that is designated by the funding agency (for example, PubMed, NIH's designated repository or PAR, a similar repository for NSF and DOE) or a repository that is managed by a trusted institution (for example, UVA's Open Access Repository - LibraOpen). However, depending on the publisher's self-archive policy, an author may not be able to share the final manuscript without embargo. If the publisher requires an embargo, you might need to choose a different publisher or choose to publish as open access, which may involve an Article Processing Charge (APC). However, the OSTP memo makes clear that making research open access does not necessitate the payment of APCs; there are always other paths to open available to researchers. Likewise, the data can be published in a data repository designated by a funder (such as these NIH-Supported Scientific Data Repositories), or a domain/discipline specific repository, or if none exist or apply to you, you can publish your data in UVA's institutional data repository - LibraData. Additional information about open access can be found in the Library’s Open Access and Scholarly Publishing guide Additional information about research data management can be found in the Library’s Research Data Management guide.
While we await further policy development from federal agencies and reaction/response from publishers, if you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to the Scholarly Communication Services team at lb-scholcomm@virginia.edu (general questions) or Research Data Services at researchdataservices@virginia.edu (Research Data questions) for assistance.
Adapted from: https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/public-access/faqs and https://libguides.princeton.edu/ScholarlyCommunication/ostp-memo