On March 23, the Department of Transportation (DOT) issued a request for input on the development of its public access plan. The request outlined eight specific questions including how best to improve access to outputs from DOT-funded research and how to implement persistent identifiers (PIDs).
SPARC submitted comments reiterating the importance of repository deposit as a full compliance option and underscored that research outputs should be shared in standardized, machine-readable formats and made available under an open license, such as the CC BY license or its functional equivalent.
The comments also recommend the Department allow for the deposit of research outputs in either DOT’s existing repository or other repositories that have the characteristics outlined in the National Science & Technology Council’s (NSTC) Desirable Characteristics of Data Repositories for Federally Funded Research and the U.S. Repository Network’s (USRN) Desirable Characteristics of Digital Publication Repositories.
Read SPARC’s Comments: Response to DOT RFI