UC authors, especially those with grant funding, may have requirements to make their scholarly articles or research data publicly available. Below you can find information on the categories of the sources of these policies as well as links to where you can find more information.
Federal funding agencies require public access to articles and data
Agencies that sponsor research are interested in maximizing the value of the research that they fund. Increasingly, this means requiring the recipients of grants to make the results of their research – both scholarly articles and the data supporting them – freely available to the public.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has had a public access policy for articles since 2008. In 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo requiring more agencies – all those with more than $100M in R&D expenditures – to develop a plan to require public access to both publications and data arising from the grants they award. In 2022, OSTP issued a new memo, expanding the requirement to all federal agencies and eliminating the 12-month delay in availability. Agencies are expected to have their new policies requiring immediate access to federally funded research in place by the end of 2024, with effective dates one year after their policies are issued.
Please consult the guide to U.S. Federal Agencies’ Public Access Plans for the most up-to-date information on requirements for sharing articles and data funded by federal grants.
California state agencies require public access to scholarly articles
In 2018 the law was expanded to cover research grants from all state agencies. Authors receiving grant funds from any California state agency after January 1, 2019 (or from the CDPH after January 1, 2015) must deposit the author’s final version of their manuscript in an open access repository like eScholarship within 12 months of publication.The author’s final version is the post-peer review, editor accepted version, which has not yet been formatted by the publisher.
For more information, read the full text of the revised law or see this flyer, “AB 2192: State Research Grant Open Access Requirement” [PDF]. If you are a UC researcher with questions about your obligations under a contract or grant, contact the office of sponsored projects on your campus.
University of California open access policies
The Academic Senate of the University of California adopted an Open Access Policy on July 24, 2013, ensuring that future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge. A precursor to this policy was adopted by the UCSF Academic Senate on May 21, 2012. On October 23, 2015, a Presidential Open Access Policy expanded open access rights and responsibilities to all other authors who write scholarly articles while employed at UC, including non-senate researchers, lecturers, post-doctoral scholars, administrative staff, librarians, and graduate students.
Learn more about the University of California Open Access Policy.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science lab managed by University of California, has its own open access requirements, which you can read about at the Berkeley Lab Publications Website.
Many sources of grant funding have public access policies
The World Bank, Autism Speaks, The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and other organizations require grant recipients to deposit their manuscripts in open access repositories. SHERPA/JULIET tracks these funder requirements.
