[WITHDRAWN] Engaging with Open Science and Navigating New Grant Funding Requirements

As recently outlined by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, by the end of 2025 all federal agencies will implement public access policies that require funded researchers to make all publications and their supporting data freely and immediately accessible publicly. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has already enacted their data sharing requirement. NIH-funded researchers who do not share data in a publicly accessible repository will have their funding disrupted or possibly terminated. This agency is often the leader in public access policies, and it is expected other agencies will follow suit.

Open science is not only the future of all federally funded research in the US, it is also key to democratizing knowledge and increasing the transparency of our research. Yet, social work has not built a culture of open science and scholarship on its own. Instead, policies such as those above will push social work researchers into adopting open scientific practices.

Sharing data and publications openly could be a bumpy road for researchers who are unfamiliar with processes, requirements, compliance options, and tools to help them through the research lifecycle. Capitalizing on this lack of knowledge, scholarly publishing and data companies are building systems that bias compliance with open science requirements towards protecting and extending their financial interest, rather than the public interest.

For example, when federally-funded researchers submit manuscripts for publication in academic journals, for-profit publishers will steer authors towards $3,500+ article publishing charges (APCs) rather than archiving the accepted manuscript in an institutional repository for free. Similarly, manuscript submission platforms are a “click through� experience that prevents authors from making changes to the copyright agreement that would enable them to retain their author’s rights and comply with public access policies utilizing other options. Because so few social work journals are open access, and so few journals provide encouragement to share publications and data in publicly accessible repositories, open science practices will not come naturally to researchers. Navigating open science and the new public access requirements will be challenging, especially when for-profit publishers and data companies leverage their market power. Every social work researcher must engage in professional development if they hope to comply with federal grant requirements.

Our workshop will walk researchers through the open science workflow, from preregistration of hypotheses through sharing of deidentified data. Grafting these requirements onto existing research workflows, the presenters will provide hands-on tutorials in using free resources such as the Open Science Framework and DMPTool. Our workshop is also relevant to researchers not seeking federal grants who want to learn more about open science.