Academic journals will have to provide immediate access to papers that are publicly funded, providing a big win for advocates of open research and ending a policy that had allowed publishers to keep publications behind a paywall for a year.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy said that the guidance had the potential to save lives and benefit the public on several important priorities.
According to the head of the office, the American people fund tens of billions of dollars of cutting-edge research each year. The American public should not have to wait for the returns on their investment in research.
The guidance was called transformational by the director of the Open Research Funders Group. It was important in expanding the public's access to research but fell short in some areas.
The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are two of the largest agencies in the federal government. A major expansion of the guidance is that it covers nearly all federal bodies.
Open-access advocates hailed the directive as a game-changer for accessibility because it requires that publications be made available in machine-readable formats.
Mr. Tananbaum said that the White House policy made equity a guiding principle for access to research.
He said that if you are at a large, R1, research- intensive institution, your academic library probably already pays subscriptions to many of these journals. Not many people are associated with R1 institutions. More people are not. They should have access to this information. Their taxes are paid for.
He said that the latest policy expands the circle of science. It expands the discussion.
The cost of articles behind a paywall can range from $25 to $50, which can add up to hundreds of publications, according to a professor at a Mexican university. Dr. McKiernan has been working in Mexico and Puerto Rico for the last decade and she has seen the effects of restricted access on students and colleagues.
She said the White House guidance was part of a larger global trend.
A spokeswoman for Springer Nature, one of the largest publishers of journals, said in a statement that it was still reviewing the White House memo, but that it counted more than 600 fully open-access journals among its offerings.
The first signs of resistance were contained in the statement. Funding agencies need to increase their financial support for the publications in order for the research to be free to the public.
It is looking forward to working with the research community and O.S.T.P. to understand its guidance in more detail.
According to Michael Eisen, a University of California, Berkeley, professor and a long time champion of open access, the government's directive established a principle: that federally funded research must be free to the public. The publishing lobby has watered down previous attempts to do so.
The government is finally laying down the hammer and saying, 'Look, we're not waiting anymore.' We have been talking about this for a long time.
The White House stated that President Biden had been committed to ensuring that the public had access to research. He told the American Association for Cancer Research that people could pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to subscribe to a single journal.
The journal owns the data for a year according to Mr. Biden. Most of the taxpayer-funded cancer research sits behind walls after it is published. I want to know how this is moving the process quickly.
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