How the Public Access Submission System is Ideally Suited to Address the New Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Memorandum

In August of this year, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced new guidance that requires all federal agencies to define, by 2025, policies that ensure immediate public access to federally funded research publications in agency-designated repositories. These policy changes have the potential to dramatically increase access to public research, but they also come with implementation challenges. These agency-designated repositories can have highly variable submission requirements and capabilities, and research institutions often have their own open access policies and guidelines, which introduce additional expectations. Taken together, all of these requirements place a considerable burden on researchers who wish to comply with all applicable public access policies with minimal effort. The Public Access Submission System (PASS) was designed specifically to address these challenges. PASS was created to take into account the requirements of multiple federal agency and institutional repository systems and to guide researchers through the deposit process, ensuring that all of the necessary information is collected at one time and then submitted to all of the required deposit endpoints. Originally created in 2018 at Johns Hopkins University, in collaboration with the Harvard University Office for Scholarly Communication and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, PASS became an Eclipse Foundation open source project in 2022. This transition is not an end-point for the project but rather a new beginning, one which is intended to spur greater collaboration by relying on the infrastructure and shared governance framework provided by the Eclipse Foundation. Working with Eclipse, the PASS project has already embarked on major technical upgrades and is now better equipped to support community input and contributions. This presentation will provide a brief history of the PASS project, review the reasoning and strategy behind moving the project to the Eclipse Foundation, then discuss recent developments, future roadmap, and collaboration opportunities. The White House memo encourages federal agencies to work together to define consistent open access policy. Similarly, research institutions should be working together to simplify the processes and reduce the barriers that researchers face in sharing their work.

https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.pass

Presentation