On August 25, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
(OSTP) released a memo regarding public access to scientific research. Signed
by Director Alondra Nelson, this updated guidance eliminated the 12-month
embargo period on publications arising from U.S. federal funding that had been
allowed from a previous 2013 OSTP memo.
While reactions to this updated federal guidance have been plentiful, to date
there has not been a detailed analysis of the publications which would fall
under this new framework. The OSTP released a companion report along with the
memo, but it only provided a broad estimate of total numbers affected per year.
Therefore, this study seeks to more deeply investigate the characteristics of
U.S. federally funded research over a 5-year period from 2017-2021 to better
understand the updated guidance's impact. It uses a manually created custom
filter in the Dimensions database to return only publications that arise from
U.S. federal funding.
Results show that an average of 265,000 articles were published each year
that acknowledge U.S. federal funding agencies, and these research outputs are
further examined by publisher, journal title, institutions, and Open Access
status.
Interactive versions of the plots are available online at
https://ostp.lib.iastate.edu/.Comment: 27 pages, including Appendix. 11 figures, 6 table