ARL Comments on US National Institute of Justice Draft Public Access Plan

The US National Institute of Justice (NIJ) requested comments on its “Draft Public Access Plan.” The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is pleased to provide comments on the plan below.

November 27, 2024

Department of Justice

National Institute of Justice

810 Seventh Street NW

Washington DC 20531

Re: Notice: NIJ Draft Public Access Plan

On behalf of the members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), thank you for the opportunity to provide comments on the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) “Draft Public Access Plan”, the NIJ’s first public access plan. ARL is a membership organization representing the largest research libraries in the United States and Canada, which are committed to the advancement of open scholarship and open access to accelerate scientific advances and expand public participation in federally funded research. We appreciate NIJ’s commitment to ensuring the results of federally funded research are widely available without embargo, utilizing persistent identifiers to uphold scientific integrity, considering long-term storage and access needs, accepting author-accepted manuscripts in public repositories, and establishing structures to promote equitable publicly funded research access. We submit the following comments to NIJ’s Notice OJP (NIJ) Docket No. 1826.

Concerning NIJ’s questions centered on equity, ARL recommends the following:

What steps should NIJ take to improve equity in access to peer-reviewed publications?

NIJ can ensure that final publisher PDF versions, when they are provided as a means of compliance with the Public Access Plan, are accessible by people with disabilities. Ensuring digital accessibility is critical to enable equitable delivery of federally-funded research results. We recommend that NIJ consider ways to advance progress in the priority areas for digital science and technical publications identified by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, including:

Meeting and surpassing federal requirements for digital accessibility of science and technical publications.

Promoting awareness of barriers to digital accessibility, advance training to reduce such barriers, and increase accountability for improving the digital accessibility of science and technical publications.

Promoting improvement and use of platforms, apps, testing tools, and resources that facilitate the design, creation, production, interoperability, and user experience of accessible science and technical publications.

How can NIJ ensure equity in publication opportunities for NIJ-supported authors?

ARL recommends that NIJ recognize peer-reviewed preprints that are substantially similar to author-accepted manuscripts for policy compliance.[1] This approach provides an immediate avenue for researchers to disseminate their work widely. Preprints can increase equitable access to the broad public, as preprint repositories do not charge a fee for access. Preprint deposit benefits researchers, as their scholarly articles will be made more broadly available, increasing the likelihood of use and citation.

ARL applauds NIJ’s plans to use PubMedCentral (PMC) as its official repository for grantee publications, and we recommend clarifying for grantees if use of PMC is required or suggested. If PMC is not required, ARL recommends that NIJ also recognize institutional repositories as an acceptable mechanism for policy compliance. Institutional repositories, especially those supported by research libraries, have made significant investments in making accessible and preserving the intellectual outputs of their institutions. ARL’s member libraries support researchers across disciplines in storing, preserving, and making their manuscripts and research data publicly available. They provide infrastructure through institutional repositories and offer invaluable assistance from librarians and professional staff to ensure compliance with public access policies and standards.

Concerning NIJ’s questions centered on publications, ARL recommends the following:

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)?

ARL member institutions are high research producing, and benefit from the reach of their authors’ research globally and in a timely way. For public and land-grant institutions, broad dissemination of research is part of institutional mission.

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?

NIJ may want to specifically clarify for researchers that there is no charge for manuscript deposit into PMC (or an institutional repository, should they be allowed under NIJ’s Public Access Plan) and that publishing charges by journals are not public access compliance fees. It is critical that researchers have options for compliance that do not require researchers to pay publishing fees.

Concerning NIJ’s questions focused on data, ARL recommends the following:

What opportunities or benefits do you anticipate you or your institution would realize from a requirement that the data underlying your NIJ-funded peer-reviewed publications be made publicly available?

Recent ARL research[2] has found the average researcher expenditure for research data management and sharing activities throughout the grant project period was $29,800 or 5.83% of their award amount. This research found that the average yearly institutional expense (researcher expense + service provider expense) for data management and sharing is $2,500,000 with a range from approximately $800,000 to over $6,000,000. Further, our research indicates that Libraries and University IT bear the greatest financial and service burden for data management and sharing (Table 1). While researcher direct costs may be included in grant budgets, overall institutional expenses are not yet well accounted for through institutional direct or indirect cost reimbursement.

Table 1: Average annual costs to support research DMS services by service provider area (values are rounded to three significant figures)

Service Provider Total Average Annual Cost Standard Deviation

Libraries $303,000 $164,000

IT Offices $249,000 $218,000

Research Offices $93,800 $60,400

Institutes & Centers $94,900 $76,500

Total Cost (Sum) $740,000 $107,000

Based upon the information above and to ensure researchers have support to meet requirements, ARL recommends that NIJ:

Minimize the administrative and financial burden on researchers and institutions for compliance by working with institution-based service providers to educate and support the preparation of materials for sharing for public access.

Provide examples or case studies of data management and sharing budgets. Clearly specifying allowable and unallowable costs for data management and sharing activities will be beneficial to researchers. For instance, some researchers under the new NIH Data Management & Sharing Plan are budgeting $0 for the data management and sharing budget, despite including a robust data management and sharing plan in application materials.[3] ARL recommends clearly stating if data storage and repository expenses post-award are allowed.

Develop a mechanism to ensure that funds are available post-closeout for publication and research data storage and/or sharing expenses. Post-award publication funding may be particularly important for early-career, postdoctoral, and graduate student researchers whose publication and data-sharing costs may not have been factored into the original grant budget.

The issue of federal grants covering post-closeout costs is unresolved for the research community, and is certainly not unique to NIJ. NIJ may wish to collaborate with libraries and research institutions to study how publication costs could be funded after a grant has ended, to address situations in which an article is accepted and a fee is due after the grant money is spent or is the term of the grant has ended. Such a solution might also cover costs related to research activities, like peer review or copyediting.

Furthermore, ARL recommends reviewing and prioritizing the adoption of community-centered principles for the ethical care of research data and for engaging stakeholders. For example, the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance were created to allow Indigenous Peoples to assert greater control over the use of Indigenous data and knowledge.[4] Tribal stakeholder engagement should be expected for research done on or about Indigenous Peoples.

How can NIJ provide broad access to datasets while protecting sensitive personal, proprietary, or national security information?

ARL recommends that NIJ encourage its researchers to utilize tiered access mechanisms to differentiate datasets based on sensitivity levels. Descriptors or metadata of sensitive data, or high-level aggregated data, can be made publicly available, while sensitive datasets can be placed in controlled environments, such as secure data enclaves or tiered access repositories, with access granted through review processes and data use agreements. In this way, the requirement to provide full public access to datasets can be waived while still expecting researchers to provide as much access as they responsibly can.

NIJ may also want to encourage its awarded organizations to adopt cross-functional tools that provide notifications to the appropriate departments or individuals, helping to streamline processes for data classification, access management, and compliance monitoring of sensitive data. For example, ARL and the California Digital Library (CDL) are exploring institution-wide adoption of machine-actionable data management and sharing plans, which could enhance institution-wide coordination by alerting relevant stakeholders to data needs.

Concerning NIJ’s questions focused on persistent identifiers (PIDs), ARL recommends the following:

How can NIJ best implement the use of PIDs for people, institutions, and research products?

ARL commends NIJ for adopting PIDs such as ORCID for individuals and DOIs for research products. To strengthen implementation, ARL recommends extending the use of DOIs to all scholarly outputs, including software and code, and utilizing Crossref’s Open Funder Registry IDs. Additionally, ARL recommends that NIJ require the use of Research Organization Registry (ROR) IDs to accurately link researchers with their affiliated institutions, ensuring consistency and transparency across datasets and publications. Robust use of PIDs will also provide future researchers and research product users with the necessary infrastructure to link their work to the data and resources they are reusing.

Concerning NIJ’s questions focused on software, ARL recommends the following:

How can NIJ improve the archiving, sharing, and maintenance of NIJ-funded software for reuse?

Effective management and sharing of software and code are essential for research transparency and integrity. ARL recommends including “software and code” when defining research data, and recommends the agency require the sharing of software code with necessary documentation to properly use and ute the code.

Guidance Documents: We further recommend creating guidance or sharing the report “Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Software Preservation” with investigators to clarify the legality of archiving legacy software and ensure continued access to digital files. Furthermore, clearly define what falls under software sharing and archiving requirements. Clarify whether code written for simple tasks, such as sorting or cleaning data, which may be redundant and unrelated to scientific outcomes, needs to be shared

Documentation Requirements: Documentation and code markup are crucial for understanding and running code. Partner with institutions, libraries, and scholarly societies to provide training and best practices for code documentation, reducing the administrative burden.

Concerning NIJ’s general questions, ARL recommends the following:

How can NIJ ensure broad access and accessibility to the outputs of NIJ-funded research?

ARL recommends that manuscripts, research data, and other research outputs stewarded in agency-designated repositories be integrated into institutional repositories (IRs) through an API or other transfer mechanism. This dual deposit strategy, coupled with standardized metadata and common frameworks, enhances accessibility and reuse while minimizing duplication of effort, ensuring NIJ funded research outputs are widely available and effectively managed.

ARL appreciates NIJ’s consideration of findability, accessibility, and reusability throughout the plan. We recommend explicitly stating that data, metadata, and other scholarly outputs should be aligned with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, which also emphasize interoperability.

What are the best practices (from academia, industry, and other stakeholder communities) for managing public access to research results?

Promote Comprehensive Public Reuse: ARL recommends that all final publications, research data, and other published outputs carry full reuse rights, not merely the right to be made available in a repository. Full public reuse enables broad secondary analysis, extension of research findings, and application of innovative methodologies, including text and data mining, AI deployment, and other computational technologies.

Rights Retention and Reuse: Under the federal purpose license created by 2 CFR 200.315, federal agencies have a non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free license to exercise all rights under copyright for works that they fund. Such licensing is compatible with US copyright law. The federal purpose license encompasses the bundle of exclusive rights codified in Section 106 of the US Copyright Act, and confers maximum flexibility to federal agencies to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use federally-funded works. The federal purpose license allows the government the ability to authorize others to use work funded by Federal grants. Under 2 CFR 200.315, NIJ can explicitly condition federal funding on researchers granting NIJ a non-exclusive license to make manuscripts publicly available in the agency-designated repository or repositories available to the public in machine-readable formats to support accessibility and facilitate text mining.

Data Management (and Sharing) Plans: In order to effectively manage public access to research results, NIJ should consider adopting best practices that prioritize standardization, interoperability, and alignment with established frameworks. Using standardized terms like Data Management Plan (DMP) or Data Management and Sharing Plan (DMSP), rather than Archive Plan, reduces researcher burden by aligning with terminology already used in other federal policies and funding requirements, such as the CHIPS and Science Act (Section 10344b). This consistency minimizes confusion, simplifies compliance, and allows researchers to leverage existing templates, tools, and resources developed for similar requirements.

We look forward to continued engagement with NIJ during the development and refinement of the “Draft Public Access Plan.” Please feel free to contact me or my colleague Marcel LaFlamme, Director, Research Policy and Scholarship, marcel@arl.org, with any questions about these comments.

Sincerely,

Andrew K. Pace

Executive Director

Association of Research Libraries