Open Access and Interoperability Advanced

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 27, 2022

• A Big Win for Open Access: United States Mandates All Publicly Funded Research Be Freely Available with No Embargo

  Creative Commons celebrates this big news along with the wider open community that we have worked with for so long to ensure publicly funded resources are freely available and openly licensed (or dedicated to the public domain) by default. The public deserves to have uninhibited, equitable and immediate access to use and re-use the research, data, educational resources, software and other content it funds. Our collective ability to create and share digital public goods to create a better world requires it. This new OSTP guidance realizes essential elements of that vision.

• Huge News: Biden Administration Announces All Publicly Funded Research Should Be Available For Free To The Public

  Here’s some amazingly good news amidst all of the nonsense of late. On Thursday, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the White House announced that they were updating policy guidance to mandate that all taxpayer-supported research should be immediately available to the public at no cost. According to the actual policy guidelines, US departments and agencies have until the end of 2025 to make this change (though, it’s not clear that there’s any remedy if they don’t). This is really huge — and it seems to have come out of nowhere.

• Interoperability is the secret to effective healthcare

  According to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, 32% of individuals who went to the doctor in 2018 reported a gap in information exchange. This gap included anything from needing to redo a test because their prior data was unavailable, provide medical history because their chart could not be found, bring results to an appointment, or waiting longer than expected for lab results. This lack of data stewardship causes a loss of patient data, which forgoes interoperability that the health IT industry has been working toward for 20+ years. Below we will discuss the move to interoperability, key takeaways from the April 2022 ONC annual meeting, and the importance of archiving data.