Gail Steinhart and Katherine Skinner, announcing a new Invest in Open Infrastructure report on data-repository funding:
Here, we present an initial report on our findings as part of our project to investigate “reasonable costs” for public access to United States federally funded research and scientific data, generously supported by the US National Science Foundation. This paper focuses on research data as one of the key scholarly output types impacted by the Nelson Memo.
The full report is worth reading—there’s good definitional work, as well as an impressive overview of the data-repository landscape. My one qualm is that the report, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t address the implications of US public-access policies for unfunded researchers. The report is mostly neutral on the various approaches to funding, with direct “structural” support surveyed alongside membership and per-deposit fee models. The problem is that any approach that relies on researchers or their host institutions to pay membership or per-deposit fees will exclude scholars; the only fair and sustainable approach is a direct, collective approach that is free to researchers. If the US adopts a mechanism-neutral policy—akin to its APC agnositicism on the article side—we may find ourselves with a broader, fee-based landscape that leaves researchers (including those from the Global South) unable to share their data.