Month: August 2022

New OSTP policy guidance for making federally funded research public

On August 25th, 2022 the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum from Dr. Alondra Nelson, head of OSTP, to “Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies” on “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research.” Known as the “Nelson memo” this OSTP policy updates and expands the 2013 “Memorandum on Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research” (known as the “Holdren memo“) in significant ways. Details of how each federal agency will implement specifics of this new policy will unfold in the next 6-24 months, but here are some “quick takes”:

  • By the end of 2024, all federally funded research will be immediately available to the public at no cost, removing the previous 12-month embargo;
  • All 400+ federal agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, are covered by the policy, expanding beyond the 20 or so Federal agencies with $100 million annual R&D expenditures covered by the 2013 policy;
  • The policy makes peer reviewed scholarly publications and the underlying data of that research publicly available at no cost. This covers all articles and their data, and individual agencies may also choose to include book chapters, editorials and conference proceedings under their guidelines;
  • Existing inequities for underserved communities and early career researchers in their access to research publication are explicitly centered and addressed;
  • The policy calls for the use of standardized metadata, persistent identifiers (PIDs) for researchers and research outputs, and machine-readable formats, thus improving how the research is discovered and shared;
  • Cost coverage for publications and data is addressed, and authors and/or their institutions are not expected to pay an author publication charge (APC) for compliant publication. The OSTP briefed Congress on cost implications of the policy with the Economic Landscape of Federal Public Access Policy report;
  • The policy takes steps to ensure scientific and research integrity and implementation of those provisions go into effect starting in 2027.

For more information on the new OSTP policy, see 2022 Updated OSTP Policy Guidance from SPARC and see responses to the policy posted by the White House.

Citations: what can we make of them?

In academia, we are taught to cite our sources, and this practice extends to building knowledge through research and development. Source citation is intended to legitimize our methods, analysis and conclusions, as well as to recognize the works of others. But what are we citing, and why?

Nancy K. Herther writes about The Increasingly Complex World of Citations: Changing Methods and Applications in two parts. In Part I, she reviews the history and purpose of citations – from reward to valuation and evaluation – of funding requests, publication and application of results. Citation analysis for these purposes began with articles and expanded to patents in the 1980’s. Other research outputs, such as data and software code, have become cited sources as information on the Internet has exploded. Citations and citation analysis have also become subjects of research, and questions remain about how they function.

Three major bibliographic databases provide indexing and discovery from which citations are cultivated, though each has different coverage and content:

  • Dimensions – covers citations to publications, grants, patents, datasets and policy documents, creating a broader context of networked research information;
  • Scopus – mostly peer-reviewed journals from 11,678 publishers in life sciences, social sciences, physical sciences and health sciences;
  • Web of Science – basis for the original citation index, includes regional, disciplinary, data and patent citations.

Herther outlines some of the major, current issues with citations and areas for further research:

  • Citation & retraction – a mixed history of noting citations of works that have been retracted;
  • Citation mapping & future research agendas – mapping and visualization are promising new fields;
  • Big data research – citation & co-citation analysis to examine the relatedness of core papers;
  • Citation bias – questionable research? scientific misconduct? exclusion based on gender, geography, affiliation, etc.?;
  • Linking productivity to creation of the “citation elite” – a contributor’s number of citations can skew times cited, especially in times of massive (Covid) research outputs;
  • Examining the value of the H-index – changing authorship patterns point to value of fractional allocation measures.

Part I concludes with an interview with University of Notre Dame Philosopher Hannah Rubin about structural sources of citation gaps, feedback loops and persistent inequities.

In Part II, Herther interviews physicist, science historian and co-scientometrics founder Henry Small about changing trends in scientific citation. Small applauds the movement away from using citation and usage numbers as proxies for quality and hails the development of tools that build “citation context” to tell us why citations are used in particular circumstances.

One of these tools is scite, and Herther also interviews its founder, Josh Nicholson. Scite partners with 24 publishers to index 3 million+ articles and 1.5 billion citations. They discuss the role of burgeoning pre-prints and publication text analysis to determine the purpose of the citation – from “We could not reproduce this work” to “We find a smaller effect.” These interviews give us a sense of where citations have come from and how better analysis and research can serve more equitable and informed research communities going forward.