Notice2024-22285
Request for Comment on NIJ Draft Public Access Plan
Primary source
Metadata and text below are from the Federal Register, a public-domain U.S. government work. Always verify the official published version before relying on it for any legal matter.
Published
September 30, 2024
Issuing agencies
Justice DepartmentNational Institute of Justice
Abstract
The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) seeks input from all interested stakeholders, including NIJ grantees, criminal justice practitioners, academics, publishers, nonprofits, and the public as it develops a Public Access Plan to increase access to publications and data resulting from NIJ-funded research.
Full Text
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<title>Federal Register, Volume 89 Issue 189 (Monday, September 30, 2024)</title>
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[Federal Register Volume 89, Number 189 (Monday, September 30, 2024)]
[Notices]
[Pages 79639-79641]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [<a href="http://www.gpo.gov">www.gpo.gov</a>]
[FR Doc No: 2024-22285]
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DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
National Institute of Justice
[OJP (NIJ) Docket No. 1826]
Request for Comment on NIJ Draft Public Access Plan
AGENCY: National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs,
Department of Justice.
ACTION: Notice; request for comments.
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SUMMARY: The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) seeks input from all
interested stakeholders, including NIJ grantees, criminal justice
practitioners, academics, publishers, nonprofits, and the public as it
develops a Public Access Plan to increase access to publications and
data resulting from NIJ-funded research.
DATES: Individuals wishing to submit comments must do so by 5 p.m.
Eastern Time November 29, 2024, as instructed below.
ADDRESSES: You may submit comments by sending electronic mail (Email)
to: <a href="/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#19696c7b75707a37787a7a7c6a6a37777073596c6a7d7673377e766f"><span class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="34444156585d571a5557575147471a5a5d5e744147505b5e1a535b42">[email protected]</span></a>.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Gregory Dutton, Physical Scientist,
National Institute of Justice, 999 North Capitol St. NE, Washington, DC
20002; telephone number: (202) 532-5612; email address:
<a href="/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#482f3a2d2f273a31662c3d3c3c2726083d3b2c2722662f273e"><span class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="660114030109141f4802131212090826131502090c48010910">[email protected]</span></a>.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Ensuring broad access to the products of
NIJ-sponsored research is critical to achieving our mission to provide
evidence, data, and tools to inform criminal and juvenile justice
communities, victims services providers, and the public. NIJ is
drafting a Public Access Plan to expand timely access to the results of
NIJ-funded research and the data underpinning it. Facilitating access
to both publications and data without barriers increases transparency
and reproducibility. This has the potential to accelerate new
discoveries and practical applications and contribute to evidence-based
changes in policy and practice, which is all in the public interest.
NIJ's Public Access Plan is expected to be implemented for new awards
made in Fiscal Year 2025. NIJ intends to include these key
requirements:
<bullet> That all peer-reviewed publications resulting from NIJ-
funded research will be made freely available to the public without
delay, by requiring the authors to deposit their manuscripts in a
public repository designated by NIJ.
<bullet> That the data underlying those publications will be made
available at the time of publication.
<bullet> That persistent digital identifiers and metadata will be
used to facilitate findability and reuse.
Access to Scholarly Publications
The current scientific publishing model places many peer-reviewed
journal articles behind paywalls, which can make access inequitable.
While large research institutions often have subscriptions or
negotiated publisher agreements granting them full access, the general
public and many criminal justice practitioners typically do not. One
approach authors take to reach broader audiences is to publish their
work under ``Gold'' Open Access. The publisher collects an upfront fee
to make the article free to all readers. This cost must be borne by the
author, their institution, or the funding agency, putting additional
financial strain on institutions and researchers. A second approach is
for the author to make their author accepted manuscript--to which they
typically retain the rights--available in a public repository. This is
referred to as ``Green'' Open Access. While the manuscript made
available under this approach is not the publisher's version of record,
it accurately reflects the final peer-reviewed text, except for
formatting. Since 2013, large federal science funding agencies (e.g.,
National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department
of Energy) have required that a version of all peer-reviewed
publications be made publicly accessible within 12 months of
publication (2013 OSTP Memo). More recently, a call was made for all
federally funded peer-reviewed publications and associated data to be
made publicly accessible upon publication without delay (2022 OSTP
Memo).
NIJ expects its grantees to publish the results of their work in
the peer-reviewed literature. But since NIJ was not subject to the 2013
OSTP Memo, our current policy does not mandate public access to these
publications. Currently, grantees must notify NIJ of these publications
simultaneous with their public release, and they are encouraged--but
not required--to index them at the National Criminal Justice Research
Service (NCJRS) Virtual Library. This aids discoverability, but
[[Page 79640]]
many NIJ-funded publications are behind publisher paywalls and
inaccessible to many. To expand access, we are drafting a Public Access
Plan that will require grantees to deposit their accepted manuscripts
under Green Open Access at a public repository.
To facilitate this, NIJ plans to use PubMed Central (PMC) as our
official repository for grantee publications. This would permit NIJ to
tap into the digital infrastructure and deep expertise of the National
Library of Medicine, a leader in digital library information
technology. It would allow for the long-term preservation and
availability of NIJ peer-reviewed publications, in a machine-readable
format, along with their associated metadata, free of charge. PMC
provides accessible manuscripts to the extent possible. As used here,
accessibility refers to both machine readability, which makes
information available for data mining, as well as to the use of
assistive devices by people with disabilities. Accessibility can be
limited by the completeness of the information submitted by the
authors, and NIJ aims to maximize the accessibility of grantee
submissions (e.g., through the inclusion of alt-text for figures). PMC
can accommodate both author accepted manuscripts and publisher versions
of record. PMC assigns a unique identifier to each article in addition
to collecting digital object identifiers (DOIs) for versions of record
when available. Through PMC's application programming interfaces
(APIs), NIJ can make all our publications in PMC findable via the NCJRS
Virtual Library. This would ensure that users can find and access all
publications resulting from NIJ-funded research (including peer-
reviewed publications, grant reports, and other documents published by
the grantee or NIJ) at a single location.
Data Associated With Scholarly Publications
There is a broad and growing acknowledgement of the importance of
sharing datasets that are well-documented and reusable. This serves
both to confirm the reproducibility of reported findings and to enable
new discoveries. Scientific datasets are increasingly considered
primary research products, on par with journal publications. Secondary
analysis might yield new conclusions or allow for exploration of new
research questions with existing data. Despite these benefits,
researchers and institutions may incur additional costs in assembling,
storing, and curating these datasets.
NIJ requires grantees to archive their full project data at the end
of the project period at the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data
(NACJD) or an alternate repository appropriate to their field of study
(<a href="https://nij.ojp.gov/funding/data-archiving">https://nij.ojp.gov/funding/data-archiving</a>). The terms of data
archiving for each project (e.g., what constitutes the data, where it
will be archived) are established in a Data Archiving Plan submitted at
the proposal stage. The NIJ Data Officer reviews and approves this plan
after an award is made and any requested revisions have been
incorporated.
To expedite access to research data and consistent with other
federal science agencies, NIJ now proposes to make public access to the
data underlying grantee peer-reviewed publications mandatory at the
time of publication. Researchers in some disciplines already routinely
provide access to their data as Supplementary Information along with
their publications. For others, this may be new. While the default
expectation will be for maximum access, this requirement may be waived
if the data are subject to disclosure concerns. This could include
proprietary information; data pertaining to national security or law
enforcement operations; Indigenous data; or data that could lead to a
breach of personally identifiable information. As it does now for end-
of-project data, NIJ will develop processes for requesting waivers for
the release of publication data where legitimate disclosure concerns or
prohibitions exist. Existing guidelines and award condition language
will be revised accordingly.
Persistent Identifiers
A persistent identifier (PID) is a unique identifier for research
information (e.g., publications, data, researchers, institutions) that
is persistent, machine processable, and follows metadata schema.
Greater use of PIDs would allow NIJ to use a federated approach whereby
research data reside in appropriate repositories and the PID serves as
a point of discovery and a means of linking information. This approach
allows data assets to be managed by the research communities that
create and use them, while simultaneously making them available to
other users. However, this relies on third-party repositories ensuring
data preservation and access over time, as well as the ongoing
engagement of domain-specific expertise for dataset curation within
scholarly communities.
Currently, NIJ encourages principal investigators (PIs) and co-PIs
to provide a researcher PID (e.g., ORCID) at the time of application.
This helps NIJ assess applicants' publishing histories as well as track
the products of NIJ funding into the future. NIJ's grant reporting
process also encourages researchers to report PIDs for publications and
datasets (typically DOIs).
NIJ intends to expand its use of PIDs. In line with NSPM-33
specifications, NIJ plans to require the NSPM-33 compliant Common Forms
(i.e., Biographical Sketch, and Current and Pending (Other) Support),
which should include researcher PIDs, with all applications.
Additionally, NIJ is exploring the assignment of PIDs, via CrossRef, to
grant award numbers and final grant reports, as well as NIJ-published
content such as the NIJ Journal.
Questions
Commenters are encouraged to respond to any or all of the following
questions. Additional comments relevant to public access are also
welcome. The Freedom of Information Act applies to all comments
received and may require release of part or all of a comment. NIJ
anticipates publishing a summary of the comments received. No
personally identifying information about the commenters will be
included in the summary.
EQUITY
What steps should NIJ take to improve equity in access to peer-
reviewed publications?
How can NIJ ensure equity in publication opportunities for NIJ-
supported authors?
PUBLICATIONS
What opportunities or benefits do you anticipate you or your
institution would realize from a requirement that NIJ-funded peer-
reviewed publications be made available in a designated repository
(e.g., PubMed Central)?
What challenges or barriers do you anticipate facing in complying
with a requirement that NIJ-funded peer-reviewed publications be made
available in a designated repository?
If you are an author, have you published under Gold Open Access?
Have you deposited your Author Accepted Manuscripts in a Green Open
Access repository? Why or why not?
If you are an author, have you attached use licenses (e.g. Creative
Commons) to your publications to clarify the terms of use and reuse by
others? Why or why not?
DATA
What opportunities or benefits do you
[[Page 79641]]
anticipate you or your institution would realize from a requirement
that the data underlying your NIJ-funded peer-reviewed publications be
made publicly available?
What challenges or barriers do you anticipate in complying with a
requirement that the data underlying your NIJ-funded peer-reviewed
publications be made publicly available?
How can NIJ provide broad access to datasets while protecting
sensitive personal, proprietary, or national security information?
If you are an author, have you made your publication data available
along with your publications? What repositories did you use and why?
PIDs
What should NIJ consider in improving the findability and
transparency of its research through PIDs and metadata?
How can NIJ best implement the use of PIDs for people,
institutions, and research products?
SOFTWARE
How can NIJ improve the archiving, sharing, and maintenance of NIJ-
funded software for reuse?
GENERAL
How can NIJ ensure broad access and accessibility to the outputs of
NIJ-funded research?
What are the best practices (from academia, industry, and other
stakeholder communities) for managing public access to research
results?
What will be the biggest challenges to NIJ implementing a public
access policy, and how can these challenges be addressed?
RESPONDENT BACKGROUND
To contextualize your responses, please give any relevant
information about your background, including primary field of study,
type of institution, career stage, community partnerships (if
applicable), and anything else that may impact your relationship to
scholarly publications and data.
NIJ publishes this notice pursuant to its authority at 34 U.S.C.
10122(c) and 6 U.S.C. 161-165.
Nancy La Vigne,
Director, National Institute of Justice.
[FR Doc. 2024-22285 Filed 9-27-24; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4410-18-P
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