The USDOT Public Access Plan was issued in response to the February 22, 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies entitled "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research". Through this memorandum, OSTP directed all Executive Departments with greater than $100 million in yearly research and development expenditures to prepare a plan for improving the public's access to the results of federally funded research.
This plan establishes objectives to ensure public access to Publications and Digital Data Sets arising from DOT-managed research and development (R&D) programs. DOT already provides access to intramural and extramural research in progress and technical reports, as well as many final publications through partnerships with organizations such as the Transportation Research Board (TRB). Many DOT R&D programs are already making data sharing a priority. DOT's intramural research programs have a long history of making data available to the Public. On an incremental basis, DOT's extramural research programs are taking steps to increase data sharing. The purpose of this plan is to scale and institutionalize those intramural and extramural R&D access practices across the Department.
The USDOT Public Access Plan was first published December 16, 2015. On August 25, 2022 the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy released the memo "Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies: Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research," which called for updates or new additions that should be reflected in an agency's public access plan. As a result, USDOT is currently undergoing this process and will be releasing a new version of the public access plan in the coming year.
With the implementation of the DOT Public Access Plans, new terms and conditions for all DOT funding agreements will require:
1. Immediate grant of a comprehensive non-exclusive, paid-up, royalty-free copyright license to the DOT.
2. Submission of any publications to the NTL digital repository.
Per the terms and conditions, funded institutions will grant DOT a non-exclusive license for anything copyrightable created under the funding agreement. The license must include "all rights under copyright," including, but not limited to:
Principal Investigators must ensure that all rights under copyright are non-exclusively retained by DOT and that the terms and conditions of publication to peer-reviewed journals and other outlets do not impair the obligation of the authors to comply with the DOT Public Access Plan.
Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, What can I do with this work?
The six licenses and the public domain dedication tool give creators a range of options. The best way to decide which is appropriate for you is to think about why you want to share your work, and how you hope others will use that work. Learn more from the Creative Commons website.
For help, try the CC license chooser.
DOT strongly encourages researchers to deposit data under the Creative Commons CC-BY Attribution or an equivalent license, to the extent possible. The CC-BY license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.
