2026 starts mandatory free, immediate, and public access to all federally funded research

By Dane S. Claussen

Dec. 31, 2025, is the deadline for all U.S. federal agencies to ensure that publications and their supporting data resulting from federally funded research are publicly accessible without any embargo on their free and public release.

Starting in 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has set a series of deadlines and guidelines for federal agencies to move toward all federally funded government research to be publicly available. Communication scholars in the past have frequently received research funding from the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, and occasionally from the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Department of Education, or other federal agencies.

The OSTP’s original 2013 Memorandum on Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research concerned federal agencies that spent more than $100 million each year on research and development. By 2022, nearly every such agency had complied with the 2013 memorandum, and OSTP said that its 2013 memorandum had made 8 million scholarly publications available to the general public with an average of 3 million views per day. In 2022, a follow-up OSTP document, the Memorandum for Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, covered all federally funded research and set the Dec. 31, 2025, deadline for public access to research without embargoes. The Dec. 31 deadline also requires federal agencies to establish “transparent” procedures that “ensure scientific and research integrity is maintained in public access policies,” and to coordinate with OSTP to “ensure equitable delivery of federally funded research results and data.”

The 2022 Memorandum required agencies spending more than $100 million annually on research to have a public access plan by late February 2023, and required agencies spending less than $100 million annually on research to have a public access plan by Aug. 20, 2023. All such plans were all required to be published for public comment by Dec. 31, 2024, for implementation on or before Dec. 31, 2025.

The 2022 Memorandum is available at: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-Access-Memo.pdf

Despite the final deadline for policy implantation not being until Dec. 31, 2025, most federal agencies already have had policies and procedures concerning public access to federally funded research for several or more years. For example, the National Science Foundation has had a general policy about public access for several years:

NSF advocates and encourages open scientific and engineering communication. NSF expects significant findings from research it supports to be promptly submitted for publication, with authorship that accurately reflects the contributions of those involved. Copyrighted material published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers included in juried conference proceedings must comply with NSF’s Public Access Policy as implemented in the award general terms and conditions.

Applications for NSF research grant applications already have been subject to the NSF’s policy on writing and submitting a “Data Management and Sharing Plan,” including general guidelines for the content of that plan:

Proposals must include a document of no more than two pages uploaded under “Data Management and Sharing Plan” in the supplementary documentation section of Research.gov. This supplementary document should describe how the proposal will conform to NSF policy on the dissemination and sharing of research results (see Chapter XI.D.4), and may include:

• the types of data, samples, physical collections, software, curriculum materials, and other materials to be produced in the course of the project;
• the standards to be used for data and metadata format and content (where existing standards are absent or deemed inadequate, this should be documented along with any proposed solutions or remedies);
• policies for access and sharing including provisions for appropriate protection of privacy, confidentiality, security, intellectual property, or other rights or requirements;
• policies and provisions for re-use, re-distribution, and the production of derivatives; and
• plans for archiving data, samples, and other research products, and for preservation of access to them.

Data management and sharing requirements and plans specific to the Directorate, Office, Division, Program, or other NSF unit, relevant to a proposal are available on the NSF website. If guidance specific to the program is not available, then the requirements established in this section apply.

Simultaneously submitted collaborative proposals and proposals that include subawards are a single unified project and should include only one supplemental combined Data Management and Sharing Plan, regardless of the number of non-lead collaborative proposals or subawards included. In such collaborative proposals, the Data Management and Sharing Plan should discuss the relevant data issues in the context of the collaboration.

Proposers who feel that the plan cannot fit within the limit of two pages may use part of the 15-page Project Description for additional data management information. Proposers are advised that the Data Management and Sharing Plan must not be used to circumvent the 15-page Project Description limitation. The Data Management and Sharing Plan will be reviewed as an integral part of the proposal, considered under Intellectual Merit or Broader Impacts or both, as appropriate for the scientific community of relevance.

A valid Data Management and Sharing Plan may include only the statement that no detailed plan is needed, for example, if no data, samples, physical collections, software, curriculum materials, or other materials are to be produced in the course of the project. However, such a statement must be accompanied by a clear justification.

In addition, the National Science Foundation provided “specific guidance” for researchers in various individual fields, or groups of fields, of the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. The requirements and recommendations for most communication researchers who submit a research grant application to the NSF is the Specific Guidance for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences, which is available here: https://www.nsf.gov/sbe/data-management

Communication researchers submitting research grant applications to other departments and agencies of the federal government must consult the public access policies of the department or agency to which they are applying for funding. Again, most federal agencies already have had these policies in place for a year or more, and many communication researchers already have complied with relevant public access policies in submitting research grant applications, let alone when conducting and publishing federally funded grant research. Anecdotally, communication researchers who have submitted research grant applications to the NSF say that writing an NSF-required Data Management and Sharing Plan has not been onerous.