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# OSTP
- URL: https://www.gabestein.com/tsuyuj9p/
- Published: 2022-09-02T01:10:24.000Z
- Updated: 2025-06-25T15:33:39.000Z
- Description: Jeff Pooley has the goods on the OSTP announcement: it's a great step, but not without significant downside risk for equity in publishing.
- Author: Gabriel Stein
- Tags: Links & Sundry, publishing, Blog, #Import 2025-06-24 22:46

I’m a week behind posting about this, but the White House Office of Science & Tech Policy basically lit up the open academic publishing world with its [new memo](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-Access-Memo.pdf?ref=gabestein.com) mandating, among other things, immediate, open publication of all federally-funded research, without exclusions for humanities smaller agencies.

That’s good news, but as Jeff Pooley so astutely [points out](https://www.jeffpooley.com/2022/08/the-big-apc-question-mark-hovering-over-the-ostp-announcement/?ref=gabestein.com) on his blog, the current guidance could lead to a lot of unintended consequences and ultimately have the effect of increasing extant inequities in publishing. Here’s how:

> Here’s the basic problem. As a [growing number of studies document](https://www.jeffpooley.com/2022/08/the-apc-damn-is-breaking/?ref=gabestein.com), most of the world’s academic authors (including most humanities and social science authors in the U.S.) can’t afford the often-usurious fees. The APC model, with its tolled access to authorship, is the subscription model seen through a camera obscura: author paywalls in place of reading paywalls. Thus the prevailing APC regime fixes one barrier to access, for readers, by erecting another, for authors.

His [whole analysis](https://www.jeffpooley.com/2022/08/the-big-apc-question-mark-hovering-over-the-ostp-announcement/?ref=gabestein.com) is worth reading for its careful parsing of both the announcement and some of the community responses to it.

My own spin is the same thing I have been saying, to little response, at every meeting with just about every funder, partner, RoR researcher, and anyone else who will listen since 2020: we need a funded, community-driven campaign, similar to the news industry’s [Membership Puzzle Project](https://membershippuzzle.org/?ref=gabestein.com), to research, document, and support the adoption of the types alternative funding models that Pooley mentions.

If anyone out there wants to work with us on that, please get in touch.[1](#fn-0-bottom) We’ve got the plans, partners, and infrastructure to do it. We just need the resources.

### Footnotes

1. gabe AT knowledgefutures DOT org [↵](#fn-0-inline)