NIJ Seeks Input into Public Access Plan

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), is seeking stakeholder input into the development of its Public Access Plan. NIJ is interested in hearing from NIJ grantees, criminal justice practitioners, researchers, publishers, and other interested parties.

Development of the plan aligns with the Biden Administration’s 2022 directive that federal agencies make peer-reviewed publications resulting from federal funding freely available to the public immediately following publication. However, it is important to note that given its size, NIJ is not required to comply with the 2022 memorandum, unlike larger federal science agencies (e.g., National Institute of Health or National Science Foundation). NIJ’s current policy includes an expectation that results are published in peer-reviewed journals; however, it does not mandate public access to these publications. Instead, grantees are required to notify NIJ of publications at the time of public release and are encouraged to index them with the National Criminal Justice Research Service (NCJRS) Virtual Library. Still, as the request for comment states, many publications resulting from NIJ support remain behind publisher paywalls and inaccessible to the public.

The new Public Access Plan will require grantees to deposit their accepted manuscripts in PubMed Central, the free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature maintained by National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine. The use of PubMed Central, according to NIJ, will allow for “all publications resulting from NIJ-funded research (including peer-reviewed publications, grant reports, and other documents published by the grantee or NIJ)” to be findable at a single location and linked to the NCJRS Virtual Library.

NIJ intends to implement its Public Access Plan for awards made in fiscal year (FY) 2025, and plans to include the following requirements:

• 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.
• That the data underlying those publications will be made available at the time of publication.
• That persistent digital identifiers and metadata will be used to facilitate findability and reuse.

The request for comment includes a series of questions for interested stakeholders to consider. Public input should be submitted by email to public.access.nij@usdoj.gov and will be accepted through November 29.