Eager: investigating reasonable costs to achieve public access to federally funded research and scientific data

This $299,454 Project Grant was awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070) to Code for Science and Society, Inc., a non-profit organization. The grant funds a 2-year research project to investigate the reasonable costs involved in publishing federally funded research outputs in publicly accessible venues. The project aims to produce insights, tools, and strategies to address disparities in public access to research across different institution types and tiers. Key research questions include: 1) the costs of publishing openly accessible research, 2) how much US researchers and institutions pay to make federally funded outputs publicly available, 3) the workflows researchers use to secure public access, and 4) how institutions determine reasonable cost thresholds for public access publication venues. The project will examine differences in approaches across institution types. This research aligns with NSF's mission to support the advancement of computing, communications, and information science through investigator-initiated projects.

Abstract

This project will investigate costs involved in publishing research outputs in a range of publicly accessible venues. Using a mixed research model, the project will produce insights, tools, and intervention strategies to highlight and mitigate current disparities between institutions and researchers in different research tiers and institution types. National adoption of open science practices aims to ensure all that all citizens benefit from immediate and free access to federally funded research. However, even when those digital research outputs are free for users, their publication and management are not ?free.? This raises significant questions regarding who should pay for these processes and how much. As researchers, research offices, scholarly societies, publishers, libraries, and various data management and scholarly communication infrastructure providers actively grapple with emerging policy changes, this research will address key questions: 1) what are the costs of publishing publicly available research, and how do these differ across publication types, institution types, and disciplines; 2) what do US researchers and research institutions pay directly or indirectly (e.g., through transformative agreements) to make federally funded outputs publicly available; 3) what workflows and decision chains do researchers and their research institutions use to secure appropriate public access channels for research outputs; and 4) how do researchers and research institutions currently establish a threshold for reasonable cost for publicly available venues, and do they budget this as allowable expense? As this research is conducted, the project will especially look for differences in both thought and action across institutional types and tiers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.