[MUSIC PLAYING]
MICHAEL PALIN: June the 4th, 1973, was much like any other summer's day in Peterborough. And Ralph Mellish, a file clerk at an insurance company, was on his way to work as usual when-- [BRASS STING] --nothing happened. [MUSIC PLAYING]
You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the virtual studio with Wendy Hagenmaier and Fred Rascoe. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme, and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it.
Our show today is called, "Didn't You Get the Memo?" CHARLIE BENNETT: Fred, I did not, nor am I aware of the purpose or contents of the memo.
Well, on August 25, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP for short, released a memo which will have a big impact on scholarly communication.
Specifically, all federal agencies have to make sure that all their funded research is open to the public.
OK. I feel like I'm trapped in a loop. Didn't this exact same thing happen in 2013?
So this is the new and improved memo. This time--
I can hear the quote marks around those words, Wendy.
So this time there's no publication embargo and more research data. And today's guest is Katharine Dunn, a scholarly communication librarian who was in the profession when the 2013 memo was released. We'll find out what this new memo means, and how the original 2013 memo did or didn't impact her library.
And our songs today are about breaking free of restrictions, being desperate, and trying to solve big problems in scholarly communication in 2022. It's desperate times. But let's start with a look back to nine years ago. This is "2013" by Sunflower Bean, right here on Lost in the Stacks.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks. Our show today is called, "Didn't You Get the Memo?" And the memo we're referring to was issued August 25, 2022 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP for short. The official title of this memo was, quote, "Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research." To find out more, let's go ahead and meet our guest and have her tell us what this memo actually means.
My name is Katharine Dunn, and I am a scholarly communications librarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So the memo that came out follows on a-- it's sort of a strengthening of and a building upon the 2013 memo that came out called-- the so-called Holdren memo from the Obama administration-- I think February 2013-- that came out and said the big huge 19 federal funder agencies, like NSF, NIH, NASA and others, they need to create public access plans.
And they make a distinction between public access and open access, but we can talk about that-- to make public access plans so that their papers-- so that the papers that come out of research that they find are openly available in a repository. And if they want to add a 12-month embargo to that they could, and all of them did.
And so this new memo under a new OSTP, a new director, new president, strengthens that by actually eliminating that 12-month embargo or administrative period and adding a requirement for the data that underlies the research that comes out in a paper, requiring that that be made openly available at the time of publication as well. So previously, researchers had to create data management plans, but they did not have to release the data at the same time, and now they do.
So that's what the new memo says.
Right. And that is key. There's a new memo calling-- it's 2022-- it's been known as the Nelson memo after the current director of-- or acting director of OSTP. And as you say, that 2013-- it builds upon that 2013 memo. And yeah, as you said, Holdren, after John Holdren, who was the director at the time under Obama. And you've hit on also the fact that it's kind of asking-- it's making the same sort of asks of researchers, but it's updating it a little bit.
The key updates, besides the embargo that you mentioned, and the fact that research data is now more explicitly mentioned, what other updates are there in this new memo?
So I don't know them all off the top of my head, but some of them are that-- well, they've expanded the definition of what a publication is. So previously, a publication-- I'm not sure if it was defined-- it probably was-- is a journal article-- peer-reviewed is sort of the key-- coming out in a journal. That's generally where researchers are putting their research, in a peer-reviewed academic journal. Now they've realized that publications have really expanded.
There are different-- publishing something doesn't mean necessarily a journal article. It's not a huge expansion, but it now includes conference papers, book chapters. I can't remember what else. Anyway, it includes more things, which is great. Metadata is another one.
I think certainly in the original memo-- I was just looking at some of my old notes-- metadata, meaning the data about data, the sort of information about the paper-- where it was published, who published it, who the authors were, et cetera, who's funding you. Some of that stuff was required in the earlier memo.
But now there are more stringent requirements about metadata and releasing metadata, so that the public knows who is-- what research funder is funding what research, and what authors are publishing out of that funding, et cetera. What else?
Did we mention that the number of agencies has significantly increased?
Right. So it used to be just the ones that had $100 million a year in R&D expenditures, and now it's any federal agency. So that includes, for example, the National Endowment-- no-- whatever-- the NEH, whatever that stands for.
Oh, yeah. For the humanities, yeah. KATHARINE DUNN: Humanities, yeah. So it includes the smaller ones. They get a little more time, I believe, to create those plans and implement them because they haven't had them before. But yeah, it includes all of those. There's something else that I'm trying to remember. But the big agencies, as you said, have always-- have since 2013 had to have a plan in place for making journal articles open-- your USGS, National Science Foundation, NASA.
The big ones have some infrastructure in place.
They do. Yeah, I won't get into my whining about that yet, my complaints about that yeah. But they do, but it took them a while. But another thing that is new is federally funded data that is not underlying the research that comes out in an article, researchers will have to come out with a plan for making that data open. And then there are lots of things related to funding and equity and so on that are mentioned.
And I don't want to say in passing-- they are mentioned-- they're in there, it's just there's no details really about how implementation will look. So the memo calls for funders to allow researchers to include costs related to possibly funding-- or papers and data, making them openly available to include those costs in their plans. But it doesn't really talk about what will that funding-- is that funding going to be for paying for article processing charges? Is it just for-- it's not clear.
So those kinds of details will come out in the implementation.
There's a lot of things that I think are going to shake out. In the 2013 memo, the Holdren memo, it took a while for details to shake out as well. I think the Holdren memo gave a year or two for these organizations to plan and to implement. And this new memo, the Nelson memo, also is-- I think you're supposed to submit a plan within the next six months. And then things will be implemented ideally by the end of 2025.
So were you in your current position as Scholarly Communication Librarian at MIT when the 2013 memo came out?
I was. I may have had a different title then, but I was basically doing this work. Because we had an open access policy that launched-- that was passed in 2009. I came on board-- I was in grad school until 2010 in library school. And then I volunteered at the library doing stuff related to the OA policy, actually. And then I got a part-time job, and then it became a full-time job. And so, yes. I was there. We were already deep into implementing our open access policy when the memo happened.
So we-- it seemed like it was not a huge shift in our work. Although, we did-- as we talked about-- as I mentioned in the Spark meeting last week, we did a ton of work to kind of get ready for what we thought would be this just deluge of questions and concerns and pain points from researchers. And not that we had had a lot, actually, for the OA policy, which was a faculty-wide policy.
But we just thought because each federal funder is going to have a different timeline, and maybe different sort of details in their implementation, we just thought, we better be ready. We better know this stuff cold for when the researchers come to us.
We'll be back with more from Katharine Dunn about the new OSTP memo after a music set.
File this set under JC585.F7.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You just heard "Freedom for You," by The Attack. And we started with, "I Want to be Free, " by Loretta Lynn. Those were songs about breaking loose from what restricts you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. We're speaking with Katharine Dunn, Scholarly Communication Librarian at MIT about the new open access memo from the Office of Science and Technology Policy. This new memo updates a version of the memo from the 2013 Obama administration. And back in 2013, here at Georgia Tech, we prepared ourselves for the deluge of questions and requests for help with the new Federal open access policy. But mostly, well, nothing happened. The library was minimally impacted.
And I asked Katharine if that was her experience at MIT.
Yeah. So here's what happened. We had our OA policy in play. We had DSpace ready to go, is an open repository software that we use. So we were underway. We had what we called the OA Policy Outreach Team, which was made up of liaison librarians and me and our head of Scholarly Communications and others. And basically, we were building workflows from scratch. How should we get these papers from researchers?
Because it became clear very early on that researchers were not going to-- it was not going to be if you build it, they will come. We learned that almost instantly, it was-- we better-- we have to go out and sort of fight for those papers and find creative ways to get them. And then the memo happened in 2013, and we really had our workflow underway for the OA policy. And at that point, we switched-- we created a team called STORE-- the Support Team for Open Access Requirements.
We patiently waited for each-- agencies came out kind of slowly with their public access plans, and then even more slowly with the implementation of them. And as they would come out, we would analyze them together. We would write up summaries. We would write news posts for our website. We would make postcards, and we would-- to hand out to people about federal funder policies.
We would start off-- we started offering to visit departments and talk to faculty at an annual meeting with a liaison to talk about federal funder policies. Very quickly, created-- because the Department of Energy-- I don't know if you remember. The Department of Energy was I think the only, or at least one of the only agencies to say, you don't have to put a paper in our repository, the DOE repository, if you don't want to. You can use your home repository.
And we took that and ran with it, and said, oh, yeah let's build a tool, let's build a homegrown tool, where people can deposit their paper. And while they're waiting for it to be live, they'll get a URL to send to the DOE, so that the DOE knows that it's going to be live in our repository. And meanwhile, we know that it's federally funded. And we know that they're in compliance, and we do all the stuff. So we had our tech team build this tool.
It was not a small matter to get this together because we're a pretty small library. We're not-- we don't have endless resources. And I think we had one person submit a paper through our Public-- we called it Public Access Quick Submit. And it's no longer even working because nobody used it. It was sort of sad. And then in 2019-- we had basically disbanded our team. And then in 2019, I found an email that I sent out to the group saying, hey, guys.
Here's some news about federal funders, and it's not great. And the news was that the Government Accounting Office had written a report saying 11 agencies haven't yet figured out compliance, seven agencies have done-- so it's just-- I don't even know if everybody's figured out compliance on the first memo yet. I guess-- I'm not sure.
I think there are definitely some gaps. Even when papers are reported to say, like the NSF, and it shows up-- the record shows up in their-- their repository is called PAR. I think Public Access Repository-- maybe that's what that's for. Yeah. A paper shows up there.
And really, to technically comply with the OSTP memo, after a 12-month embargo, the author's manuscript version, which if you're not familiar-- for our listeners-- is the peer-reviewed version of the article, but just not the final published version with all the publisher formatting. That's supposed to be available in this NSF repository. I don't know if you found this, Katharine, but I've gone to look for papers in there, and the manuscript version is not there.
It's just links to the publisher paywall version.
Oh, boy. I've kind of lost the thread, frankly, just for talking to you and because of the new memo, I went back and started looking at-- I was like, oh, yeah. I used to really try to look to see if things were showing up there, and they weren't. But then I stopped doing it after a while.
But I think your larger point though also stands, is that your researchers-- they'll do what they have to do. And so often, like the library saying, hey, we have a repository, too-- that is an extra step for them. And they're like, no. It's DOE. I'll just put it in OSTI. Or it's in NSF, I'll just put it in PAR, or whatever it is. And they're just-- there's not-- they don't have a need to engage with the library, at least that's what I found with the 2013 memo.
I think you're absolutely right. My husband is actually a physicist at MIT, and he is NSF-funded. And we-- I've sort of stopped asking him about public access stuff a while ago. But then I brought it up just the other day because I went into PAR. I looked him up, not expecting to find his papers, but they were there. And so I was like, Scott, are you depositing your papers to the NSF repository? And he-- at first he said, no. And then he went, oh, no, no. I guess I am.
[LAUGHTER]
And the reason he is, is because they, of course, are tying it to his funding. So he has to do it now, which is great. But it happens during this annual report that the NSF and other agencies probably all require for researchers to fill out, which is like 20 pages of descriptions of how they're spending their money, how they're paying their students, who they're collaborating with. And then, of course, it used to be they just had to list their papers.
And now they also are directed to PAR to deposit them. So because it's again, like you just said, it's in that moment of need. They don't need us for that. They're not confused about it. They might be confused-- he said actually he was a bit confused because he always forgets that he has to make it into a PDA-- an accessible-- a PDFA-- is that what it's called-- an accessible version of a PDF, rather than just a regular PDF. And he forgets to do that.
But other than that, I said, well, do you need the libraries for anything? He was like, nope, not really. Not interested. And we had another experience where we-- a colleague and I went to visit one of the heads of the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT-- really excited to talk about the federal funder policy. And he had no interest because he said, it's not-- well, whoever was funding him-- I guess, probably NI-- no, NIH was definitely requiring compliance.
But someone-- whoever was funding him, he was like, they aren't requiring it yet, so I'm not interested. I don't want to hear about it. So that's kind of where we've had to pull back and just realize, we can't be as aggressive as we thought we should be at the outset.
Right. It's that same old library story, just like, so desperate to help and be a part of the workflow.
It kind of makes me feel sad sometimes. Like, thinking about this today, I was like, what is our role if we aren't-- how are we helping? But we're helping. We're helping. WENDY HAGENMAIER: We'll be back with more from Katharine Dunn about federal open access policies on the left side of the hour.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi. I'm Cicely Lewis. I'm a school librarian, and I love, love, love listening to podcasts. And you're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show is called "Didn't You Get the Memo?" The current head of the White House Office of Science and Tech Policy, OSTP, is Alondra Nelson. Dr. Nelson's support for open and equitable access to science, as expressed in this recent memo, is just the latest example of a career-long support and advocacy for equity in scientific research. Here is how she characterized it in a 2021 online lecture for the National Human Genome Research Institute.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Investigating how science shapes the world we inhabit and how societal contexts shape science and technology has really been my life's work, as well as studying through the prism of the sociological imagination the relationship between reason and freedom, as C. Wright Mills put it six decades ago.
So it's really this work and those experiences that have forged the perspective I bring to public service-- the conviction that science and technology must be a tool to make lives better, safer, and fairer.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Here's hoping that open access can be a part of that strategy for science to help make life better, safer, and fairer. File this set under PZ3.B7265PS3503-- such a long call number.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You just heard "Desperation" by Phil Krauth. And before that "Oblivious" by Aztec Camera-- songs about desperately wanting to be useful, and feeling that you're going unappreciated.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show is about the recent OSTP memo called, "Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research." We started this last segment of our conversation talking about the equity piece specifically, and how it was worded in the memo.
The wording caught me up a little bit in the memo because it says something like "to restore public trust in government science."
[LAUGHTER]
I don't know if that's going to-- [LAUGHS] I mean, I hope that open access could do something like that. I don't know. That may be asking a lot.
It is asking a lot. That is funny. I absolutely noticed that as well. Like, what do they-- yeah, that's a whole other topic. Like, is that the problem? Like, is that the problem with the government? I don't know. If feels a little broader than that.
Right. I don't think debates about credibility hinge on the openness of--
Open openness. Yeah. I mean, that's part of the reasoning for making things more fine-- like the metadata aspect. They want to make it clearer what they're funding and where that money is going, I guess. And I mean, you're right, though. What is that going to help? And who's going to notice that other than those of us in that world? But I also-- I don't-- I love-- they-- equity comes up all over the place. Of course, nowadays, you can't be writing something like this without including equity.
I'm just always questioning like, what do they mean exactly? And how will it be more equitable? And there's so many squishy details in here that have to be ironed out in the implementation that we don't know exactly yet. Like, it mentions, for example, that-- where is it-- "Consider measures to reduce inequities in publishing of and access to federally funded research and data, especially among individuals from underserved backgrounds, and those who are in their early careers."
That sounds great. What does that mean exactly? I'm very interested to know what plans they have.
And how we're going-- how are funding agencies going to demonstrate that they've gotten that message-- they've taken it on board.
How will they demonstrate and measure it? Exactly. That GAO, the Government Accounting Office, report that I talked about from 2019 has 37 recommendations or something because federal funders weren't meeting the requirements. And many of the things that they included were like, hire people who really understand how to gauge whether a data management plan is sort of good or not. So there's going to be a lot of that trying to have-- make sure-- it's going to be expensive, for one thing.
And that's another thing it doesn't really talk about is how is the funding of this huge-- these requests, these requirements. But we have to have good people who can figure out the best ways to make things equitable-- how to measure the success of that. And that's going to be hard. It's going to be really hard.
Since you had experience being at MIT when that first memo came out in 2013, the Holdren memo, what did you think immediately on learning that the new memo was out?
Well, I want to say I thought, yay. This is great. It's zero embargo-- research to the world, but I didn't. And that's because it's kind of like we see how the-- cook-- how the dinner is made, whatever that expression is. I understand so well the kind of behind the scenes aspects of this. It made me feel a little cynical, in part for reasons I already said, which are that I worry that publishers are going to figure out a way, and continue doing what they're doing to make to monetize this.
And to-- they've already got the-- they've already got researchers in a sort of stranglehold because people want to publish in the journals where they want to publish. They have their journals. They know the prestige journals. They don't really want to deviate from those journals. Those are the ones they love. It's really hard to break out of that.
And if adding more APCs that the funders can pay for is what works for the publishers, then we're going to-- it's just going to be continuing the inequity of that. The publishing barrier versus the reading barrier just increases. And so I just worry that that's what's going to happen. I worry about my colleagues who work at smaller profit presses, University presses, society presses, who rely a lot on subscriptions.
And they need to-- we need to be supporting them as librarians, so they can meet these kind of mandates. Because they don't have the kind of funds that an Elsevier or Wiley or a Springer Nature have to make this happen. And it would be really sad if we lost those partners because they are vital, and they share the same values that we do. And so I worry about that. I think about the fact that we've had immediate open access in an OA policy since 2009. And immediate, of course, is never immediate.
There's this friction embargo, as Peter Suber calls it, which can be up to a year anyway. It takes us that long to figure out where people are publishing, and what we've got-- what we need to ask them for. And do they have the version we want? And it's not as easy and quick as we might think it is to get these papers. I think the data thing is really exciting. I am not a data person. We have a whole team that works on data. And it's so much newer for them.
That's going to be a really big project in the world, getting the data aspect up and running. But yeah. There's a lot of good. I just hope that-- implementation is everything. So we'll have to see-- we'll have to see what happens.
Katharine, thank you so much for joining us.
Well, thank you for having me, Fred. I really enjoyed it. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Our guest today was Katharine Dunn, Scholarly Communication Librarian at the MIT library.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
File this set under Q180.U5M326.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You just heard, "Where's the Money" by Foxygen, and before that, "The Seeming and the Meaning" by Stereolab. Those were songs about trying to solve problems of broad communication and funding.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show was all about the latest White House Office of Science and Technology memo, which directs federal agencies to make their funded research available publicly and without embargo. It may seem odd that something as innocuous sounding as a memo can so significantly impact public policy. But memos have had drastic impacts on our lives for years.
For example, in 1952, the National Security Agency, the Darth Vader of all public agencies, was established not by a congressional act, but by a memo from President Truman. Now, I realize that that's not the most inspiring or comforting example.
Yikes. I should say not, Charlie. Let's see if we can come up with a more positive example. So in August 1962, MIT scientist J.C.R. Licklider issued a series of memos about what he called the galactic network concept, which was the first known description of social interactions that could be enabled through networked computers.
OK. Well, 60 years later, now that we know some stuff about how people use the internet, I'm not so sure that's a positive example either.
OK. Well moving on. In 1995, scientist Lenny Bernstein wrote a memo to his bosses explaining that quote, "Human emissions of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, on climate is well-established and cannot be denied," unquote. Unfortunately, Bernstein worked for ExxonMobil, and his definitive language confirming what we all now know was deleted from the final resulting report.
OK, Fred. I got a memo for you-- 2022. Let's get some more optimism on this show.
I'll try.
Oh, roll the credits.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, and Wendy Hagenmaier.
Today's show was edited and assembled by Fred, while I hope embracing the power of positive thinking.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Legal counsel and a detailed guide to how the sausage is made were provided by the Burris Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
Special thanks to Katharine for being on the show, to Alondra Nelson for always keeping an eye out for ways to increase science equity. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Find us online at lostinthestacks.org, and you can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere you get your audio fix. CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week's show is called "Overnight Code," all about Raye Montague, the woman who revolutionized naval engineering.
It's time for our last song today, and we close with a song about wanting to be optimistic, even though pessimistic and cynical realities might just keep sneaking on in.
Realities-- Fred, I said more optimism. Be the Ameet.
Right, Ameet. Ah, I miss Ameet. OK. This is, "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" by X. Have a great, positive weekend everybody.
[MUSIC PLAYING]