Taylor & Francis welcomes OSTP’s memorandum on Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research

At Taylor & Francis, we extend our support to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) for its aims to make all federally funded research and subsequent data publicly available as soon as it has been published.

We share OSTP’s belief that open research is the best way to amplify and communicate research that delivers change and improves lives. As such, we stand as a partner to OSTP and associated agencies to sustainably implement their goals by December 31, 2025. We will do this in a way which is scalable, achieves the outlined aims, and ensures the ongoing diversity of the research and publishing environment.

We support open research

Researchers should have relevant, realistic options to publish and share their work, and, importantly, to make it discoverable and impactful. This extends to making sure they get appropriate recognition for their work.

This philosophy underpins our open research offer. We have a range of funder-compliant venues that meet the requirements of both the research community and OSTP. Our extensive and growing range of open research solutions include:

• 303 fully open access journals;
• open access publishing options for more than 95% of our journals;
• open access, read and publish, and transformative agreements for libraries;
• fully open research workflows via F1000’s innovative model. This offers rapid and transparent publishing in a model used by major research funders and organizations worldwide, including the European Commission, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others; and
• flexible options for OA books, including an Open Books Archive and our archiving policy.

We also provide support and leadership to guide researchers through the open data and metadata requirements outlined by OSTP:

• F1000 was the first publisher to require FAIR data and has been working closely with authors for almost 10 years to support them in best practice in data sharing.
• In 2021, T&F was the first publisher to set a data policy for all new books content.
• We partner with many leading organizations around the world to lead the industry on data guidelines, especially more recently in the humanities and social science.
• We have led on developing data citations, data peer review and on developing partnerships to enable in-article data and code visualization and analysis, even on living figures.
• We offer a suite of five data sharing policies on our journals to allow authors to choose an approach that best suits their work.
• We use ORCID IDs to identify and distinguish individual researchers, and the CRediT classification system to describe each author’s specific contributions to the work. DOIs make it easy to cite our articles and datasets.

Our longstanding and positive relationships with NIH and PMC have enabled deposit of federally funded content for many years. This extends to the rapid response to provide NLM with free access to content on covid, and more recently monkeypox. This sets the tone for a continued, positive working relationship.

Shaping an open future, together

To achieve an open future, publishers, research institutions, scholarly societies, funders, and policymakers must work together. We have a great opportunity to collectively ensure that every researcher has relevant and realistic publishing options that successfully deliver on OSTP’s guidance. A joined-up approach is needed to fully realize the significant benefits to society that this has the potential to achieve. Ensuring adequate funding and allowing for a variety of approaches to allow for innovative models and to accommodate both fast-moving disciplines and those that are not will be essential.

We should not underestimate the enormity of the tasks to fully embed, incentivize and unlock the potential of open research. This guidance is a call to action which will help drive change, but beyond this research culture is also fundamental to how researchers decide to publish and share their work. We are here to work with funders and research institutions to provide a framework that supports openness. This includes infrastructure and services to guide researchers through an increasingly complex landscape and allow them to focus on what is of most value: their research. We have the tools and networks that can help to drive this change.

In the coming weeks and months, we will work with the communities we support to consider and expand on what this memo, and other policy advancements around the world, mean for them and how we will partner to successfully realize the full benefits of open research for the world.