 You may already be familiar with making your work open access, but do you know what it means to make your work publicly accessible? This video will cover the basics of complying with the Public Access Mandate for Federally Funded Research, as well as how public access differs from open access. In 2022, the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, released a policy ensuring public access to all federally funded work. Why is public access to research important? According to OSTP, improving public access policies across the U.S. government will allow for greater validity of research results and more equitable access to data resources aligned with these ideals. In addition to greater validity of results and more equitable access to research, public access to your work increases your impact and visibility. Furthermore, since taxpayers pay for federally funded research, in principle, they should be able to access it. This access will be required soon. OSTP requires agencies to have public access policies in place no later than by the end of 2025. A 2013 directive required federal agencies with research and development budgets greater than $100 million to make scholarly research available with a 12-month embargo. The 2022 directive updates this requirement to include all federal agencies and research and data are required to be publicly accessible immediately, with no embargo. Each agency has its own plan or requirements that researchers must follow. Compliance with the public access mandate means that all federally funded peer-reviewed publications and their underlying data should be freely available, publicly accessible, in machine-readable formats, and in agency-designated repositories without delay after publication. What does it mean for research to be publicly accessible? And how does this differ from open access research? The term publicly accessible research is a term related to specific requirements for federally funded research outputs in the United States, including both articles and data. Publicly accessible research is freely available and provides for an online access mechanism. Open access does not mean that all research will be openly accessible and there could be a vetting process for secured or sensitive information. In contrast, open access is a broader term that describes any scholarly works distributed online free of access charges or other barriers. You may be able to make your work both publicly accessible and open access. Sometimes, researchers must pay for open access to their research through article processing charges. However, the policy does not require authors of federally funded research articles and data to pay these charges in order to make their work publicly accessible in a journal. Requirements depend on the funding agency, so be sure to check for specific guidance. To learn more about the new public access policy, contact the university libraries via email or visit our public access policy guide.