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Public Access Toolkit: Examples of Compliance

The public access toolkit provides guidance to researchers who receive funding from U.S. federal agencies and must comply with public access mandates.

Examples of Compliance with Public Access Mandates

Scenario 1

Dr. Elise Roberts has been awarded a $500k grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the effects of breastmilk on human brain development in infants. It has been three years, and she is now ready to publish on her study. She also has several data sets, but they are not yet ready for deposit. Dr. Roberts works with her graduate students to make the data sets FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse) so that she can deposit them to a data repository, such as the Virginia Tech Data Repository. After her first manuscript is accepted to a journal for publication, she decides to go ahead and deposit the Author's Accepted Manuscript (AAM) to VTechWorks, Virginia Tech's institutional repository, which is permissible under the Virginia Tech Open Access Policy; however, the AAM must also be deposited to PubMed Central (PMC), the NIH's designated OA repository, to comply with the NIH public access mandate. Her publisher deposits the AAM to PMC on her behalf. The two AAMs will be linked together in Google Scholar and other search engines and databases. 

Scenario 2

Dr. Roberto Gonzalez is a junior faculty member in the department of geosciences. He has been awarded a substantial grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and is eager to get started on his project. However, he is aware of the new requirements for depositing data sets that could affect his work. He decides to work with Data Services in the University Libraries to create an effective data management plan so that his data sets will be ready for deposit under the FAIR principles. He plans to deposit any manuscripts that result in journal publications to the NSF designated repository as well as his data sets to the NSF designated data repositories. 

Scenario 3

Dr. Sheila Davies is a professor of computer engineering and has won an award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Following the requirements outlined by SPARC, Dr. Davies plans to follow the NIST Plan for Providing Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research; however, some of her data is considered sensitive due to its proprietary nature and connection to patents she plans to file. Therefore, Dr. Davies will apply for an exception for these particular data sets while complying with the mandate for other data sets, where possible. She plans to publish only after her patents have been filed, but when she does, she plans to publish in an Open Access journal that also applies an open license to its articles and allows authors to retain copyright; she will rely partially on the Open Access Subvention Fund (maximum of $1500/article per year, up to two times per author per year) and her grant funds to pay for Article Processing Charges (APCs). By publishing OA, she complies with the OA mandate, even though it's not technically required to publish OA. Depending on how the NIST pursues compliance with the public access mandates, the publisher may also need to deposit the published version of record, rather than the AAM, since the publication is already published OA with an open license. Otherwise, with a subscription-access journal, the publisher would likely deposit the AAM.