In a new report published this week, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy recounts

the progress of Federal departments and agencies in implementing their public access plans, including relevant measures of progress, and additional steps being taken to improve access to the results of Federally funded research.

The high points are quite compelling. Among the successes:

-all of the 20+ agencies covered by the 2013 OSTP Memorandum on Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research have now implemented policies requiring federally-funded researchers to make articles reporting on their research freely available no later than 12 months after publication, and to create data management plans that balance facilitating broad access while protecting privacy and security concerns.

-over 2.4 million articles reporting on U.S. taxpayer funded research are now freely available.

-Most agencies have developed APIs to facilitate easier article discovery

Challenges include:

-the vast majority of federally funded research articles are still under embargo for up to a year, and are not available in machine-readable form without obtaining specific permission from publishers. -there is strikingly little coordination among agencies towards harmonizing critical article and data sharing policies -no clear plans to align Federal-wide public access efforts with current global open science policies, nor with emerging U.S. priorities related to equity, research security, and infrastructure for open science.

Read the full report here.