US federal agencies have new guidelines for making research that they have funded available to the public. Authors with federally sponsored projects will need to publicly share their research publications and supporting data immediately following acceptance and without embargo. Authors must deposit the accepted manuscript version of an article in a repository managed by the agency or their institution. Alternatively, authors may publish the article Open Access and deposit the version of record.
These requirements come from a 2022 memorandum from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy:
The memorandum directs all federal agencies that provide funding to researchers to develop guidelines for how the outputs from funded projects will be publicly shared.
Some federal agencies–such as NIH–have already implemented public access policies. Some have plans to implement them in October 2025. The date by which all agency policies must be updated in accordance with the 2022 memorandum is January 1, 2026.
Each agency has different guidelines. Look up your funder’s current policy on this list of Publication and Data Sharing Requirements by Federal Agency, created and updated by SPARC.
You can also reach out to your project contact in the Office of Sponsored Programs Administration:
The NIH implemented their policy July 1, 2025. Authors of articles accepted on or after this date need to deposit their accepted manuscript into PubMed Central without an embargo.
On July 8, 2025, the NIH pledged to instate a cap on fees that publishers can charge authors to make their NIH-funded outputs publicly available.
Your publisher’s policy for self-archiving your publication–particularly your accepted manuscript–may not align with your federal agency’s policy. You can find your publisher’s sharing policy using the JISC Open Policy Finder:
If you published your article Open Access, you are likely permitted to deposit the final version.
If your article is published in a closed journal and only available to readers through a subscription or purchase, your publisher likely does not allow sharing of the final version. Some publishers may still require an embargo on the accepted manuscript:
The Authors Alliance has a detailed Q&A for authors with NIH funding, in which they recommend that authors:
For more information about these topics, see:
Most funders require data that validates the results of published papers must be publicly available unless there are legitimate reasons to refrain from sharing (e.g., contracts, policy, protection of research subjects). Furthermore researchers are required to share data through formal mechanisms such as data repositories and data bases and self-publishing data, such as on a website, will no longer meet requirements.
Contact datashare@iastate.edu for help on how to meet data sharing requirements.
ACS Publications. (n.d.). Open access pricing for authors. https://acsopenscience.org/researchers/oa-pricing/#adc
Elsevier. (n.d.). Journals article sharing policy. https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/sharing
Springer Nature. (n.d.). US federal agency public access policy compliance. https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-science/us-federal-agency-compliance
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