Between the Memo and the Mandate: Institutional Perspectives on Public Access Readiness

Beginning on or before 31 December 2025, all recipients of United States federal research funding will be required to make their federally funded scholarly outputs, including scientific data, freely available via public access venues with no delays or embargos. These requirements arise from the 2022 Memorandum on Ensuring Free, Immediate and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research issued by the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), commonly referred to as the “Nelson memo.”

This paper reports the results from the work of the NSF-funded project “Investigating ‘reasonable costs’ to achieve public access to federally funded research and scientific data” (NSF Grant No. 2330827, 2023-2025). We summarize some of the general characteristics of our research partners and the results of two surveys focused on campus-level and unit-level responses to federal public access mandates.