EAGER: Investigating reasonable costs to achieve public access to federally funded research and scientific data

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.