In 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that it was directing all federal research funders to update existing public access policies, or to create them if they had yet to do so. These policies would require immediate public access to research that resulted from federal funding, and the expectation was that they would be implemented at the end of 2025. Then in April 2025, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) made the decision to accelerate their Public Access Policy. Author Accepted Manuscripts accepted for publication in a journal on or after July 1, 2025 resulting from NIH funding needed to be made immediately available without embargo upon the Official Date of Publication to the public through PubMed Central (PMC).
In response to NIH’s acceleration of its public access policy, and in light of the large number of NIH-funded researchers at Columbia, members of the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research (EVPR) and Columbia Libraries (CUL) collaborated to provide support to Columbia’s NIH-funded research community. Stephanie Scott (Director of Policy and Research Development), Katherine Brooks (Collection Analysis Librarian), Kathryn Pope (Digital Repository Manager) and Esther Jackson (Head of Open Scholarship) were quickly assembled to form a working group to answer Columbia researcher questions, keep each other informed about federal policy developments, share information about publisher responses, and strategize approaches to more complex questions.
The group was well-positioned to take on this role, having produced the resources Making Manuscripts Publicly Available and How to publish Open Access without Article Processing Charges (APCs) (CUL) and NIH Public Access Policy (EVPR). It quickly became clear that in addition to answering questions from individual researchers and providing open workshops about the policy change, meeting with specific departments would provide needed support to Columbia researchers. In departmental meetings with Chemistry, Biology, and Medicine, Scott emphasized the path towards policy compliance, while Brooks, Pope and Jackson highlighted the Open Access Publishing Agreements provided by Columbia Libraries.
The group also provided an open workshop, Navigating the Publishing Process as a Federally Funded Author, which was attended by just under one hundred faculty, staff members, and students from across the Columbia campuses.
The group continues to answer questions as they arise. Drawing on resources from the Authors Alliance and SPARC, CUL and EVPR staff work to stay up-to-date in order to be as responsive as possible to Columbia researcher questions, and better understand the pain points for authors in the ever-evolving federal policy landscape.
If you have questions about the updated public access policies at the NIH and other federal research funders, contact Stephanie Scott at: sfs2110@cumc.columbia.edu, or contact Katherine Brooks, Kathryn Pope and Esther Jackson at: oa-agreements@library.columbia.edu.