New Bill to Provide Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Articles on
State-Funded Research

In an effort to provide public access to research funded by the state of California, Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed Assembly Bill 2192. Under the bill, all peer-reviewed articles reporting on state-funded-research must be made available to the public no later than a year after publication.

The current California Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act, set to expire in 2020, establishes publication requirements for a grantee receiving funding from the State Department of Public Health. Among the conditions are reporting and making certain information available to the department or the public, as specified, about any published manuscript concerning their research no later than 12 months after publication. For a manuscript accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, existing law requires that an electronic version of the peer-reviewed manuscript is available on an appropriate publicly accessible database approved by the department, including the California Digital Open Source Library.

A.B. 2192 will expand the scope of the act to include research grants provided in whole or in part by any state agency within the executive branch. The bill specifies that the public availability requirements apply only to peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication. It will require the grantee to ensure that the peer-reviewed manuscript is available to the state agency on an appropriate publicly accessible repository approved by that agency, including CSU’s ScholarWorks, and would eliminate the references to the California Digital Open Source Library. The bill would also extend the operation of these provisions indefinitely.