“The Data Curation Network (DCN) whole-heartedly applauds the recent Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo, Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, which recommends federal funding agencies to develop policies for grant recipients that eliminates the 12-month embargo on publications and strengthens the requirements for research data management and sharing. This updated policy will greatly benefit the US public by accelerating new discoveries and increasing the impact of research on society. It will also bring the US in line with other regions such as Europe and Latin America, who have already adopted zero embargo policies.
As an organization whose membership includes university-based repositories (institutional repositories), the DCN welcomes this new guidance. It aligns with our mission to advance open research by making data more ethical, reusable, and understandable through widespread adoption of good practices in repository management and curation. This includes the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) (such as digital object identifiers) for research outputs, and long term preservation of datasets, publications and pre-prints, and other scholarly outputs.
In support of this encouraging and exciting news, the DCN would like to highlight the role of institutional repositories (IRs) in enabling these new requirements: …”