Impact of the 2022 OSTP Memo A Bibliometric Analysis of U.S. Federally Funded Publications 2017-2021

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Impact of the 2022 OSTP Memo: A Bibliometric

Analysis of U.S. Federally Funded Publications,

2017-2021

Eric Schares

Iowa State University

eschares@iastate.edu

ORCiD 0000-0002-6292-8221

Abstract

On August 25, 2022, the White House Oﬃce of Science and Technol-

ogy Policy (OSTP) released a memo regarding public access to scientiﬁc

research. Signed by Director Alondra Nelson, this updated guidance elim-

inated the 12-month embargo period on publications arising from U.S.

federal funding that had been allowed from a previous 2013 OSTP memo.

While reactions to this updated federal guidance have been plentiful,

to date there has not been a detailed analysis of the publications which

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 characteris-

tics 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 publica-

tions that arise from U.S. federal funding.

Results show that an average of 265,000 articles were published each

year that acknowledge U.S. 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 online at https://

ostp.lib.iastate.edu/.

Keywords— OSTP memo, Open Access, federally funded research, public access,

embargo, Dimensions

arXiv:2210.14871v3 [cs.DL] 19 Dec 2022

1 Introduction

OSTP Issues Guidance to Make

Federally Funded Research Freely

Available Without Delay

White House Press Release

On August 25, 2022, the White House Oﬃce of Science and Technology Policy

(OSTP), under Director Alondra Nelson, released new policy guidance entitled “En-

suring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research” (Nelson,

2022). The memo states that, by 2026:

“all peer-reviewed scholarly publications authored or coauthored by indi-

viduals or institutions resulting from federally funded research are made

freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-

designated repositories without any embargo or delay after pub-

lication” [emphasis preserved from original]

This new policy framework is an update to previous guidance on public access

to scientiﬁc research. A 2013 policy released by Director John Holdren allowed a

12-month embargo on publications arising from federal funding, and only applied to

federal agencies which granted over $100 million annually (Holdren,2013). By con-

trast, the new 2022 Nelson memo eliminates the possibility of a 12-month embargo

period for federally funded peer-reviewed research articles that was allowed under the

previous 2013 guidance. It also extends guidance to the data underlying those publi-

cations, strengthens the data sharing plans, contains speciﬁc metadata requirements,

and applies to all U.S. federal granting agencies regardless of their annual granting

amounts (Marcum and Donohue,2022). The Association of Research Libraries has

released a summary table outlining the details of the 2013 and 2022 OSTP memos for

ease of comparison (Association of Research Libraries,2022b).

Reactions to the Nelson memo have been plentiful and varied, with the release gar-

nering national news coverage (Vimal Patel,2022). Libraries (Association of Research

Libraries,2022a), universities (Association of American Universities,2022), librari-

ans (Samuel A. Moore,2022;Rick Anderson,2022), societies (SPARC,2022;Euro-

pean Science Foundation,2022), consultants (Clarke & Esposito,2022;Pollock and

Michael,2022), publishers (Association of American Publishers,2022;PLOS,2022;

IOP Publishing,2022), funders (Tananbaum,2022), and researchers (American An-

thropological Association,2022) have weighed in with statements or opinion pieces,

some more enthusiastic about the development than others.

Chairwoman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Eddie

Bernice Johnson and Ranking Member Frank Lucas sent a joint letter to the newly

conﬁrmed Director of the OSTP, Dr. Arati Prabhakar asking for clariﬁcations (John-

son and Lucas,2022). Questions still remain about the 2026 implementation and how

speciﬁc practices will result from this new guidance, how agencies will update their

policies, and concerns about participation in research if article processing charges

(APCs) are increased or used more widely.

2 Research Questions

In addition to the 2022 memo, the OSTP also released a companion report on the

potential economic impact of the updated guidance and its eﬀects on federal grant

funding agency policies (Oﬃce of Science and Technology Policy,2022). The report

estimates “between 195,000 and 263,000 articles were federally funded in 2020” but

does not provide a more granular breakdown of these articles. An additional analysis

estimates 197,000 federally funded articles in 2021 (Petrou,2022). Other than these

high-level studies, there have been limited analyses to more fully detail the character-

istics of publications that fall within this newly expanded scope.

Therefore, this study seeks to address the following research questions:

RQ1 How many U.S. federally funded publications have there been over the past

ﬁve years? What are the yearly totals, and what proportion do these represent

of worldwide and United States-speciﬁc output?

RQ2 Which U.S. federal funding agencies awarded these grants?

RQ3 How do the number of federally funded articles vary by research category/discipline?

RQ4 Which publishers tend to publish federally funded articles?

RQ5 Which journals tend to publish federally funded articles?

RQ6 Which research institutions are authors who tend to publish federally funded

articles aﬃliated with?

RQ7 In what manner were these federally funded articles published? Were they

published openly or behind a paywall?

3 Methodology

The analysis was conducted using the bibliometric database Dimensions, available at

http://app.dimensions.ai. This study used the paid version of the tool; there is

also a free version available, though with limited functionality. Dimensions ingests

metadata from Crossref to make connections across publications, authors, funders,

institutions, and more (Herzog et al.,2020). The database uses this as a starting

point and further enriches funding information by analyzing text provided in authors’

acknowledgments sections and through agreements with publishers to to obtain addi-

tional funding information.

Dimensions was chosen for this study because of relevant advantages over other

commonly used bibliometric databases. It indexes a wider range of journals and has

more complete coverage than Web of Science, which is estimated to cover only 10-

12% of journals (Clarivate,2021). OpenAlex, a free and open bibliographic database,

also uses metadata reported to Crossref by publishers, as well as data from the

now-discontinued Microsoft Academic Graph, scraping publisher websites, and other

sources (Priem et al.,2022). However, OpenAlex does not include funding information

in its records of works.

This study is particularly aﬀected by funding information that is deposited to

Crossref and included in Dimensions. The availability of major metadata elements in

Crossref was quantiﬁed by van Eck and Waltman (2021), who found 25% of articles

in 2020 reported some funding information. Kramer and de Jonge (2022) speciﬁcally

analyzed funder information in several bibliometric data sources and quantiﬁed the

extraction of additional funding information from acknowledgment text, going beyond

what is deposited by publishers to Crossref. Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions

all infer this additional funding information. Dimensions reported funding information

on 81% of the records in a study of publications by the Dutch Research Council,

compared to 67% availability in Crossref. However, the information was inconsistent,

with not all publications correctly naming the funder or providing the funder ID. The

performance also varied considerably by publisher.

A case study deeply analyzing one example funding statement clearly illustrates

the diﬃculties in untangling personal, ﬁnancial, and logistical acknowledgments in

the same section. Diﬀerent bibliometric databases and tools are also shown to have

diﬀerent interpretations of the same funding information (Gibson et al.,2022).

3.1 Two Possible Approaches

The most crucial part of this analysis was deﬁning the custom Funder group, which

controls which publications are included/excluded in the analysis. The Dimensions

web interface oﬀers the ability to create a custom group of any single facet type; in

this case, Funders. There were two main options to consider when deciding how to

construct this custom group - deﬁne what to include, or deﬁne what to remove.

Attempting to include all federal grant-funding agencies in one custom Funder

Group was the ﬁrst attempt. In theory, this sounds like the simpler approach; only

keep those agencies whose funded output would qualify under the new OSTP guidance.

Additionally, the OSTP economic impact report states that just six federal agencies

“account for more than 94 percent of the approximately $150 billion” in federal re-

search and development (Oﬃce of Science and Technology Policy,2022). This means

the ﬁlter would be very nearly complete after including only six agencies.

However, it quickly became apparent that identifying and building one custom

ﬁlter that covered all possible agencies, divisions, institutes, centers, and their name

variants was not feasible. For example, the U.S. Department of Health and Human

Services (HHS) is a large federal-granting agency. Within it are several Operating

Divisions, such as the National Institute for Health (NIH) or the Food and Drug

Administration (FDA). Within each of these Operating Divisions are further institutes

and centers, such as the NIH’s National Institute on Aging or the Oﬃce of AIDS

Research. Dimensions enriches the publisher-supplied metadata from Crossref with

additional information from a publication’s acknowledgments section, but authors do

not consistently identify funder names. Dimensions takes what it can ﬁnd and does

not further correlate or gather these variants into coherent groups. Depending on what

is speciﬁcally acknowledged in a publication, the funding information returned may

be as granular as a speciﬁc division, or as broad as an entire agency.

With this approach considered unmanageable, work then turned to the second

option which channeled the sculptor Michelangelo: remove everything that is not a

federal funder. However, this too had a fatal ﬂaw. While the funder information was

more consistent and the granular nature of federal data was not a concern, remov-

ing private foundations, 501(c)(3)’s, corporations, nonproﬁts, state agencies, or other

organizations had the unintended eﬀect of also removing desired publications. If an

article acknowledged funding from both a foundation and a federal agency, the fact

that the foundation was being removed from the analysis meant the entire paper would

be excluded, even though it did have federal funding and should rightly be included

in the dataset.

Therefore, the ﬁnal answer turned out to be a combination of the two approaches.

3.2 Deﬁning Custom Funder Group

With the Dimensions web interface limited to the years 2017-2021 and Country of

Funder set to United States, the Analytical View for Funders was able to quickly

export the top 500 funders to meet those criteria (both federal and non-).

Once the funder names were exported to an Excel sheet, some funders from coun-

tries other than the U.S. were still present due to publications with support from

multiple grants and international collaborations. Limiting the exported column Coun-

try to United States reduced the number of funders from 500 to 331. It was then a

manual task to search each funder one a time, investigate its status, and determine if

it was a federal agency or not. Those which were found to be foundations, 501(c)(3)’s,

corporations, nonproﬁts, state agencies, or other organizations were ﬂagged. Each

of these non-federal funders was then added to a second, temporary custom Funder

Group in Dimensions in order to exclude them all in one large batch.

In the ﬁrst round of investigation, 193 of the 331 organizations (58%) were deter-

mined to be non-federal funders, and the process of exporting, ﬁltering, and manual

investigation was repeated two more times. This uncovered 87 and 36 more funding

agencies to remove, respectively, for a total of 316 non-federal funders. The process

was halted there, since the non-federal funders were showing relatively low publication

activity (<156 over 5 years, or approx. 30 publications per year) and there were

diminishing returns when going further.

With the 316 non-federal funders excluded, there were 1.129M publications re-

maining. However, this is not the number to be concerned with, since by deﬁnition it

will be an under-count. Some papers with federal funding get excluded by the fact that

they also have non-federal funding. Now that non-federal agencies are cleaned out, the

list of funders exported from the Analytical view has only federal granting agencies

remaining, giving a cleaner picture of the dispersed and fractured naming conventions.

These 177 federal agencies were then added to a custom ﬁlter one by one, with the

number of newly qualifying papers recorded after each agency was added.

The last step was to look at the existing Funder Groups in Dimensions that appear

to all users. These pre-deﬁned groups attempt to reconcile the fractured naming

conventions for a few federal agencies, including CDC, DoD, DoE, NIH, NOAA, NSF,

NASA, and USDA. These existing groups were expanded and the individual centers

within were compared to the 175 federal agencies that made up the new custom group

thus far. 62 additional funders were found and added to the list, for a total of 239

federal funding agencies. We can be reasonably conﬁdent in the completeness of this

ﬁnal custom group. By the end of the list, agencies are typically contributing single

digits worth of unique publications to the whole, or a thousandth of a percent.

The full list of funders that make up the custom Funder Group of U.S. federal

granting agencies is included in the Appendix.

4 Results

The Dimensions web search interface was used for the analysis. The Dimensions API

was considered and investigated brieﬂy, but it would take a non-trivial amount of work

to process text ﬁelds and strings of funder information. The web interface also oﬀers

a wide range of pre-built Analytical Views, which were very useful when conducting

this analysis.

Years of publication were limited to 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, or 2021. The Pub-

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Impactofthe2022OSTPMemo:ABibliometricAnalysisofU.S.FederallyFundedPublications,2017-2021EricScharesIowaStateUniversityeschares@iastate.eduORCiD0000-0002-6292-8221AbstractOnAugust25,2022,theWhiteHouseOceofScienceandTechnol-ogyPolicy(OSTP)releasedamemoregardingpublicaccesstoscienticresearch.Signedby...

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