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Scholarly Communication

Information for the University at Albany community about scholarly communication issues, including open access, author rights, Scholars Archive, and more

White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Directive

In February 2013, the Obama administration released a directive that requires U.S. federal agencies with annual spending of more than $100 million in research and development to make the results of federally funded research freely available to the public. The directive addresses both publications and data. 

Publications
  • All federal agencies spending over $100 million annually in R&D are required to make final peer-reviewed manuscripts available within 12 months. Final manuscripts are those accepted by the journal but not yet laid out in the publisher’s formatting.
Data
  • All federal agencies spending over $100 million annually in R&D are required to store data and make it publicly accessible to search, retrieve, and analyze.
  • Scope: This covers all data necessary to validate research findings, including datasets used to support scholarly publications.

You may find details for tracking and understanding U.S. federal funder agencies’ publication and data sharing policies from SPARC.

Private Funder Requirements

Ford Foundation Open Licensing Policy 

Publications

  • This policy requires all copyrightable products funded by the grant, including white papers, research reports, and websites, to be made freely available and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license.

Data

  • The requirement to license funded products under the CC BY 4.0 license applies to “all copyrightable products.”

Gates Foundation Open Access Policy 

Publications

  • This policy requires that all publications be made openly accessible in a repository under a CC BY license immediately upon publication.
  • The Gates Foundation will pay “reasonable fees” to a publisher for an article to meet the open access policy requirements.

Data

  • This policy requires that data underlying the published research results be made immediately accessible and open.

HHMI Public Access to Publication Policy 

Publications

  • HHMI laboratory heads who are “major authors” on papers must ensure articles are freely accessible within 12 months of publication.
  • If the journal is in the biological/biomedical sciences, the article must be made available through PubMed Central. If the journal is in another scientific field, then the article must be deposited in a “comparable repository.”

Data

  • Supplementary materials must be made available along with the publication.

Journal Data Sharing Requirements

Many journals require that published articles be accompanied by the underlying research data. Data sharing policies often are found in the instructions for authors. We can help you interpret your journal’s data sharing policy, and if your journal doesn’t specify where and how you should share your data, then we can help.

Select data sharing requirements from key journals and publishers

Select resources for journal requirements for data sharing