US Federal Open Access Rulemakings To Come

In order to implement the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) public access mandate, most of the federal agencies involved will have to go through an elaborate rulemaking process. Publishers and others who are potentially impacted by this open access (OA) mandate might start thinking about how to participate in these rulemakings. To that end here is a brief strategic overview, apologies in advance for all the acronyms, but government seems very fond of its TLAs and FLAs (Three and Four Letter Acronyms)

To begin with each agency has to do its own rulemaking, but there may be ways to combine them administratively into one or more multi-agency rulemakings. So we may be looking at a lot of separate agency actions, each of which has to be addressed in its own way, or just a few. We really do not know at this point how burdensome and complex the process will be. This is the first “monster” that I described in my “Three Monsters and a Gorilla” article on the OSTP mandate. Organizations with specific concerns might want to set up small coalitions to coordinate and simplify their participation.