The Nelson Memo was never NIH-only
NIH’s public-access policy gets most of the attention in research-administration circles, but the underlying federal mandate has always applied government-wide. On August 25, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), under then-Acting Director Alondra Nelson, issued “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research” — commonly called the Nelson Memo. It directed every federal agency that funds research and development to update its public-access policy to eliminate the 12-month embargo option that had been standard since a 2013 OSTP memo (the “Holdren memo,” which itself only covered agencies with more than $100 million in annual R&D expenditures). The Nelson Memo dropped that funding-size carve-out: it applies to agencies across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, not only the traditional science funders, and it covers both peer-reviewed publications and the underlying scientific data. Agencies were directed to have updated policies in place no later than December 31, 2025.
NIH’s own Public Access Policy is one implementation of this broader mandate, not a separate initiative — and it wasn’t even the first agency to move. This piece looks at the cross-agency picture: what agencies besides NIH have done, and the real uncertainty around the mandate’s future as of mid-2026.
What other agencies have actually done
Several major funders have already updated their policies to remove the embargo:
- NIH released its 2024 Public Access Policy on December 17, 2024. The zero-embargo requirement for Author Accepted Manuscripts was originally set to take effect December 31, 2025, but NIH moved the date up to July 1, 2025 via Notice NOT-OD-25-101 — any manuscript accepted for publication on or after that date must be deposited in PubMed Central and made publicly available with no embargo, at the article’s official publication date. See CASRAI’s NIH Public Access Policy entry for the full compliance mechanics.
- NSF implements the Nelson Memo through its Public Access Plan 2.0 (“Ensuring Open, Immediate and Equitable Access to National Science Foundation Funded Research,” February 2023). Per PAPPG guidance (NSF 26-202, a supplement to PAPPG 24-1), NSF-funded Author Accepted Manuscripts tied to awards made on or after January 22, 2026 must be deposited in NSF-PAR with zero embargo, on or before the official publication date. CASRAI’s NSF-PAR guide covers deposit mechanics and how it differs from NIH’s PMC process.
- DOD released its Public Access Plan in December 2024, laying groundwork for a formal Public Access Policy.
- NASA and DOE are among the agencies reported to have updated public-access policies already in effect ahead of the December 2025 deadline.
The practical result for a multi-funder institution: there is no single “federal public-access policy” to comply with. Each agency’s plan sets its own designated repository, deposit timing, and licensing expectations, even though all of them trace back to the same Nelson Memo baseline. A researcher with NIH, NSF, and DOD funding on different projects is subject to three separate compliance mechanisms, not one.
The uncertain part: is the mandate still standing in 2026?
This is where the “expansion” framing needs a caveat. The Nelson Memo’s rollout across agencies through 2024–2025 was real, but its future is not settled. Reporting from AIP’s FYI science-policy newsletter (May 2026) indicates OSTP is “apparently in the process of repealing” the Nelson Memo under the current administration — a status corroborated by Congress itself: language in a January 2026 appropriations minibus asked OSTP to report on its repeal process, and the House Appropriations Committee’s FY2027 Commerce-Justice-Science bill explicitly “recognizes that OSTP is in the process of repealing” the memo and requested a briefing on what would replace it. As of that reporting, the repeal had not been formally completed, and what it would mean for the policies individual agencies already adopted was described as unclear — OSTP itself declined to comment on the process.
Separately, the administration’s FY2027 budget proposal reportedly seeks to prohibit federal grant funds from being used to pay journal subscription or publishing costs (including article processing charges), which cuts against the Nelson Memo’s own “equitable access” rationale for funding gold-OA and hybrid publishing routes. Multiple agencies, including NASA and NIST, have reportedly already moved to stop such payments independent of any formal memo repeal.
For research administrators, the practical takeaway is not “the mandate is being rolled back” or “the mandate is expanding” as a settled fact — it’s that the individual agency policies already in effect (NIH’s July 2025 date, NSF’s January 2026 date, and others) remain the operative compliance requirements today, while the memo that originated them is under active political and budgetary pressure at the OSTP level. Institutions should track their specific funders’ grants-policy notices directly rather than assuming the government-wide baseline is either fixed or disappearing.
What research offices should track
- Per-agency deposit deadlines — NIH (July 1, 2025, retroactive to that acceptance date) and NSF (awards made on/after January 22, 2026) are on different clocks; DOD, NASA, DOE, and smaller agencies each have their own effective dates and designated repositories.
- Licensing terms — agencies vary in how they treat CC BY vs. more restrictive licenses for the deposited manuscript; don’t assume NIH’s approach generalizes to another funder.
- Publishing-cost eligibility — if the FY2027 budget proposal to bar grant-funded subscription/APC payments advances, that’s a distinct (and separate) policy lever from the embargo question, and would affect open-access budgeting decisions directly. See CASRAI’s coverage of NIH’s proposed APC fee limits for a related, NIH-specific example of this budgetary pressure.
- The underlying concepts — for background on the deposit/embargo mechanics this policy area runs on, see CASRAI’s embargo and postprint dictionary entries, and the broader Open Access Publishing guide.
This is an actively moving federal policy area. Research offices should treat any single source (including this page) as a snapshot rather than a permanent status, and verify current requirements directly against ostp.gov and the specific funding agency’s own public-access policy page before advising researchers.
