[Federal Register Volume 89, Number 189 (Monday, September 30, 2024)]
[Notices]
[Pages 79639-79641]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[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 
(https://nij.ojp.gov/funding/data-archiving). 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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