II. Why Offer Third Party Article Deposit Services?

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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.