Impact of the 2022 OSTP memo: A bibliometric analysis of US federally funded publications, 2017–2021

Abstract

Abstract On August 25, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a memo regarding public access to scientific research. Signed by Director Alondra Nelson, this updated guidance eliminated the 12-month embargo period on publications arising from U.S. federal funding that had been allowed from a previous 2013 OSTP memo. Although reactions to this updated federal guidance have been plentiful, to date there has not been a detailed analysis of the publications that would fall under this new framework. The OSTP released a companion report along with the memo, but it only provided a broad estimate of total numbers affected per year. Therefore, this study seeks to more deeply investigate the characteristics of U.S. federally funded research over a 5-year period from 2017–2021 to better understand the updated guidance’s impact. It uses a manually created custom filter in the Dimensions database to return only publications that arise from U.S. federal funding. Results show that an average of 265,000 articles were published each year that acknowledge US federal funding agencies, and these research outputs are further examined by publisher, journal title, institutions, and Open Access status. Interactive versions of the graphs are available at https://ostp.lib.iastate.edu/.