Today, John Holdren, the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, announced that the administration is adopting a policy that would see nearly all of the science papers produced through federal funding made accessible to the public within a year of their publication. The new rules would apply to any agency that has a research budget of over $100 million, and it would include measures for preserving any digital data that was associated with the research.

A similar policy has already been adopted by the National Institutes of Health, and there were indications that the administration had been considering this measure for some time. It was perhaps pushed along by a "We the People" petition that succeeded under the previous standards, reaching 65,000 signatures (100,000 are now needed). Still, Holdren's announcement finally clarifies the intended plan.

The one-year term for publications to remain behind paywalls is only a guideline, and agencies can shift the limit based on the publishing issues faced by their particular fields. As further protection for publishers, each agency must develop, "procedures the agency will take to help prevent the unauthorized mass redistribution of scholarly publications." At the same time, however, the plan calls for agencies to provide strategies for helping the public search for and find the papers and to make metadata available for aggregation and analysis. Given all that, it's not clear whether "unauthorized mass distribution" would even be necessary.

In addition to the publications, the plan calls for agencies to preserve "digitally formatted scientific data resulting from unclassified research" and to make that accessible too. This won't include things like lab notebooks or draft versions of the papers, but it might include databases and images that were essential to the analysis.

Overall, the goal is a good one, as it should help provide the public with access to the research it paid for, and scientists will have a greater ability to find and link their research with past work. The big challenge, however, is that it's all supposed to be done without any additional spending. Preservation of data and sharing it in a usable form aren't always cheap.