II. Why Offer Third Party Article Deposit
Services?
\label{ii.-why-offer-third-party-article-deposit-services}
Building on the success of the NIH Public Access Policy, on Feb. 22,
2013 the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
released a memo titled, ”Increasing Access to the Results of Federally
Funded Scientific Research.” In short, the memo: ”…directed Federal
agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to
make the published results of federally funded research freely available
to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers
to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from
federally funded scientific research.”11Memorandum for the Heads
of Executive Departments and Agencies (Feb. 22, 2013), available at
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf.
Since 2008, the NIH has required that researchers who apply for grants
must include a PMC reference number (PMCID) when citing their papers
that were supported by NIH funds. In 2013, this was changed to require
that “anyone submitting an application, proposal or report to the NIH
must include the PMC reference number (PMCID) when citing
applicable
papers that they author or that arise from their NIH-funded research”.
Meanwhile, in 2014 an interdisciplinary, cross department research group
at OSU was going up for a renewal of their NIH award. The research team
discovered that most of the publications resulting from their initial
grant were indexed by PubMed but had not yet been deposited to PubMed
Central. Many of the faculty assumed that either publishers took care of
this or that it was sufficient to have a PubMed ID rather than the
required PMCID that demonstrates public accessibility of articles in the
PubMed Central repository.
Aware that the library had instituted an article deposit service to meet
the terms of the university’s open access policy, the research team
sought the library’s help to ensure that all of the articles resulting
from their award were deposited to both the ScholarsArchive@OSU
institutional repository and to PMC so that PMCIDs for all of the
articles resulting from the grant could be cited in their grant renewal.
The library wanted to increase the rate of article deposit to the
repository and saw a PMC deposit service as something faculty might
value that could increase that rate of deposit. Faculty have to meet the
requirements of their federal agencies or they won’t secure future
funding. With a single deposit service, the library could help faculty
meet the terms of the university’s open access policy and at the same
time help them meet federal agency requirements. During the course of
passing the open access policy, the library had promised that the policy
would position faculty and the university to meet the terms of emerging
agency public access requirements. This was a way for us in the library,
charged with policy implementation, to do just that.