Open Access Week Keynote: Two Truths and a Lie: Public Access Policy, Publishing, and Pilfering

​In August of 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued updated guidance on how federal agencies should make the research that they fund immediately and freely available to the public. Four years after the release of the "Nelson Memo," most major funding agencies have updated their public access policies and begun implementation, bringing the actual cost of knowledge into sharp relief for some observers. Against a backdrop of considerable disruption to the federally funded American scientific enterprise, bad-faith misinformation, and inconsistent interagency coordination, this talk examines the current landscape through the lens of two truths and a lie about federal public access policy. The discussion highlights the friction between the Office of Management and Budget grant cost principles and agency-specific practices, such as the National Institutes of Health's potential approach to article processing charges. Finally, it contextualizes recent revelations and potential fraud highlighted in Alperin v. Publishers to reassess the misaligned incentives and who pays for and profits from scholarly communication.

About the presenter: Christopher Steven Marcum, Ph.D., is an expert in federal data policy, open science, and scientific integrity who has served in key advisory roles across the Executive Office of the President. As Assistant Director for Open Science and Data Policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), he developed transformative science policies, including the 2022 OSTP Public Access Memo and the 2023 Federal Scientific Integrity Framework, and spearheaded the White House designation of 2023 as the Year of Open Science. As Senior Statistician and Senior Scientist in the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, he directed an information policy portfolio covering data access, research security, information quality, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence across federal science and statistical agencies. In that post, he co-authored major Executive Branch information policies including OMB Memoranda M-25-05 on open government data access and M-25-21 on federal AI adoption, chaired the Federal Statistical Research Data Center Program Executive Committee, and represented OMB on key interagency bodies including the Cybersecurity Subcommittee of the Interagency Council on Statistical Policy, the Aging Forum, and the Children's Forum. Currently an independent consultant, Chris serves as Senior Advisor for Federal Data Policy at the Federation of American Scientists and Senior Fellow at the Data Foundation. He is an elected fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and a full member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society.