As more federal agencies begin requiring grant recipients to make research results freely available to the public, college librarians have taken on a new role: helping researchers comply with open-access rules.
A February 2013 memorandum from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said federal agencies with more than $100 million in research-and-development expenditures would have to require that results be available within a year of publication.
New open-access rules will take effect in October at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, among other agencies. Researchers will risk losing grant support from those sources if they don’t make their findings freely available to the public. Several private funders, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are also shifting to public-access requirements.
In response, many college libraries are working with institutional research offices and others to let researchers know what’s expected of them.
“It’s a new area for libraries, and libraries tend to be understaffed and underfunded, but they’re still trying to serve this need,” says Bruce Herbert, director of digital services and scholarly communication at the Texas A&M University Libraries.
Library officials at some colleges say they are already prepared to support researchers, thanks to similar rules in place at the National Institutes of Health, which required an open-access policy in 2008. The National Science Foundation began requiring data-management plans with grant applications in 2011.
On Wednesday the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs moved legislation to the Senate floor that matches the 2013 White House memo. That directive was meant to give institutions enough time to be in compliance, says Myron Gutman, a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder who is a former assistant director at the NSF.
While some colleges have already found ways to make sure their authors are complying with federal requirements, he says, others have been slower to do so.
As more agencies have begun outlining their plans, it seems that many are following the NIH standard for public access, which requires that all published work from an NIH grant be deposited at PubMed Central, a free archive of biomedical and life-sciences literature.
That has eased some worry among college officials, since institutions will not have to follow significantly different procedures for different agencies, says Prue Adler, associate executive director of federal relations and information policy at the Association of Research Libraries.
Oversight of Compliance
At the University of Minnesota Libraries, staff members are laying the groundwork for greater oversight of grant compliance, says Claire Stewart, associate university librarian for research and learning.
This fall will be a busy one, she says, with federal agencies passing out grants that will be the first to require that publications be publicly available. The university also began an institutional open-access policy this year.
“When people return to campus in the fall, and some of the memoranda start hitting their desks, we anticipate we’ll have a busy fall,” Ms. Stewart says. “That’s also when we do a lot of our start-of-year outreach to faculty and to graduate students.”
Cornell University has created a network of library liaisons to reach out to its colleges and academic centers about research and scholarly communication. “In the absence of more-specific guidance from funders,” says Gail Steinhart, head of research services at the library, “there isn’t a lot else we can do.”
For now, what’s called for is vigilance about emerging plans and the questions that come up from researchers, says Oya Y. Rieger, Cornell’s associate university librarian for scholarly resources and preservation services. The university has already developed some repositories for articles, such as arXiv.org, a well-known source for articles by physicists.
After the NIH announced its public-access mandate, many research libraries focused on outreach to researchers, but to little reaction, she recalls. Once researchers understand the implications of not following such mandates — like not receiving further funding — they tend to “take ownership of the requirements,” she says.
In the past decade, some institutions have built their own repositories for articles and other research materials, putting researchers in the practice of making their findings available after completing a project.
Purdue University has three research repositories to hold historical materials and special collections, data, and articles. James L. Mullins, dean of libraries, says that his institution wasn’t scrambling, and that more than 2,000 researchers there use one of the three, the Purdue University Research Repository.
“We saw this as an important need within the university, and also one that was emerging within the academic community,” he says. “It was something that we also realized was going to come as a mandate, so we knew that we just needed to get a jump-start on this.”
The mandates, however, still mark a cultural change for researchers, he believes. The requirement is a transition that will take some time to complete, since conducting research and preparing an article can take years.
The University of Virginia in 2012 created a repository, called Libra, that accepts open-access articles as well as theses, dissertations, and data sets, says Sherry Lake, librarian for data and computer science there.
Like several other institutions, including Purdue and the Johns Hopkins University, UVa has anticipated that public availability of full data from research — not just research papers — will be the next mandate to come down from funders.
Creating data-management plans for grant applications has been a key to increased interaction of researchers and research librarians at many universities.
As the new federal rules take effect, Micah Vandegrift, digital-scholarship coordinator at Florida State University, has shifted his talking points about open access from “moral good” to “compliance.”
The impending public-access rules have also spurred more collaboration among research librarians. Colleagues at different research universities share information on Twitter under the hashtag "#OSTPResp” and on a shared Google document.
“It helps to have a network of peers,” says Ms. Lake, of UVa.
The network has also been able to share in frustrations, especially when funding agencies aren’t giving researchers guidance to work with librarians. “We would like to be recognized as a source of help for our researchers,” she says.
Still, the new rules are giving libraries a way to forge more interaction with professors and are helping to define a new role for the research library, Mr. Vandegrift says.
“Plenty of people have been struggling for a long time to figure out how to have that conversation with the faculty,” he says. “Research funders have basically handed us that opportunity.”
