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Last week the Office of Management and Budget released its Open Government Directive which was immediately followed by announcements from more than 20 departments of their new open government initiatives. One of the programs that was announced last week was the Public Access Forum, sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which was launched with the goal of discussing the release of scholarly research articles that are funded by taxpayer dollars to the public, free on the internet. The White House Blog provides insight into the online forum:

The Forum is set to run through Jan. 7, 2010, during which time we will focus sequentially on three broad themes (you can access the full schedule here). In the first phase of this forum (Dec. 10th-20th) we want to focus on the topic of Implementation. Among the questions we’d like to have you, the public and various stakeholders, consider are:

Who should enact public access policies? Many agencies fund research the results of which ultimately appear in scholarly journals. The National Institutes of Health requires that research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months after publication. Which other Federal agencies may be good candidates to adopt public access policies? Are there objective reasons why some should promulgate public access policies and others not? What criteria are appropriate to consider when an agency weighs the potential costs (including administrative and management burdens) and benefits of increased public access?

You can read more about the Public Access Forum on Federally Funded Research at WhiteHouse.gov or the Office of Science & Technology Policy Blog. Furthermore, ArsTechnica provides some insight and background into the deeper question on opening up federally funded research:

Right now, the National Institutes of Health is the only agency that requires recipients of its funding to make any scientific papers available to the public within a year of the publication date. For the next month, the OSTP will be soliciting feedback on whether and how the policy should be extended to other federal agencies.

The NIH’s open access policy started out as voluntary; researchers who received NIH funding were encouraged to send papers in for the NIH to host. That was generally considered a flop. Researchers are typically more focused on actual research, and not well versed in copyright issues, meaning the NIH’s archive was poorly populated. Eventually, Congress stepped in, and made the policy mandatory: any publication funded by NIH research had to be sent into the agency’s archive within a year of publication.

One problem with the documents at the website is that they don’t make a clear distinction between the publications that are based on research funded by federal agencies and the data behind the research itself. A more informative description of the different materials can be found in the Federal Register, which published the official request for input. “The results of government-funded research can take many forms, including data sets, technical reports, and peer-reviewed scholarly publications, among others,” that document notes. “This RFI focuses on approaches that would enhance the public’s access to scholarly publications resulting from research conducted by employees of a Federal agency or from research funded by a Federal agency.”

So, for the moment at least, the OSTP is focusing strictly on publications, and not on providing access to the raw data produced during the course of these studies (although that may be subject to separate disclosure policies, depending on the agency and material). It’s a rather significant distinction to make, given the recent controversy over the availability of climate data that was used to produce several peer-reviewed studies.

You can read more on the debate about opening up public research on ArsTechnica.