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United States Federal Public Access Policies

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy 2022 Memo:

  • Mandates federal funding agencies to develop a plan to be implemented no later than December 31, 2025, so that all final peer reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research will be placed in a freely accessible agency-designated online repository. (green open access)
  • Funded authors are not required to publish gold open access, but they should ensure that any publishers they choose to publish with are prepared to allow immediate deposit of publications (final manuscript) into the appropriate repository. Many publishers do not allow deposit of final manuscripts, so authors choosing to publisher with those publishers will have to choose to publish gold open access.  

Please see guidance from MSU Sponsored Programs and some information below on how to comply.

Please also see SPARC Guide for Authors Complying with U.S. Federal Funding Public Access and Publisher Policies. 

The NIH Public Access Policy 

  • Goes into effect for articles accepted for publication on or after July 1, 2025
  • Investigators publishing articles that directly arise from NIH funding must deposit, or have deposited for them, their author-accepted manuscript into the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central for free, immediate, zero-embargo public access upon publication.
  • For more information see NIH Public Access Policy Details.
  • Authors must carefully read the author submission guidelines for their chosen journals to ensure that the journal will allow them to publish under terms that adhere to this policy.  There are three options:
    • They choose to publish traditionally, that is, not gold open access, so they must ensure before submission that their chosen publisher will allow the deposit of the author-accepted manuscript into a repository like PubMed Central for free immediate access (this is called “green open access” or “zero-embargo green open access”). Some journals allow this for free, and some journals are charging additional fees for this. These fees have different names, and a few common versions are an “early release fee”, “immediate open access fee”, or  “article development charge.” These fees are charged to release an article published in a traditional/subscription-only journal or non-“gold” open access model without an embargo in PubMed Central to meet the requiredments of the Public Access Policy,
    • They choose to publish “gold” open access using their own funds to pay the charges.  Gold open access articles are published open access with no embargo and so meet NIH requirements.
    • They choose to publish “gold” open access by taking advantage of the many open access publishing agreements available through the MSU Libraries which allow them to do this and be in compliance with NIH requirements for no extra charge to them.   

The NSF Public Access Initiative

  • NSF Public Access Initiative 2.0 went into effect on January 1, 2025.
  • Investigators publishing articles or juried conference proceedings that directly arise from NSF funding must deposit their author-accepted manuscript into the NSF Public Access Repository (PAR) for free, immediate public access upon publication.
  • Authors must carefully read the author submission guidelines for their chosen journals to ensure that the journal will allow them to publish under terms that adhere to this policy.  There are three options:
    • They choose to publish traditionally, that is, not gold open access, so they must ensure before submission that their chosen publisher will allow the deposit of the author-accepted manuscript into a repository like NSF PAR for free immediate access (this is called “green open access” or “zero-embargo green open access”). Some journals allow this for free, and some journals are charging additional fees for this. These fees have different names, and a few common versions are an “early release fee”, “immediate open access fee”, or  “article development charge.” These fees are charged to release an article published in a traditional/subscription-only journal or non-“gold” open access model without an embargo in NSF PAR to meet the requiredments of the Public Access Initiative.
    • They choose to publish “gold” open access using their own funds to pay the charges.  Gold open access articles are published open access with no embargo and so meet NSF requirements.
    • They choose to publish “gold” open access by taking advantage of the many open access publishing agreements available through the MSU Libraries which allow them to do this and be in compliance with NSF requirements for no extra charge to them.