The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency created in 1965. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States.
Because democracy demands wisdom, NEH serves and strengthens our republic by promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying the lessons of history to all Americans. The Endowment accomplishes this mission by awarding grants for top-rated proposals examined by panels of independent, external reviewers. One key part of the NEH’s mission is to fund research in the various disciplines of the humanities. This research often results in NEH grantees publishing the results of their work in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.
Public access, the ability for the public to freely and easily access the products funded through federal grants, is central to NEH’s mission. Our enabling legislation affirms that “the humanities belong to all the people of the United States,” and that “public funds provided by the Federal Government must ultimately serve public purposes.” This has driven NEH support for widely accessible scholarship, educational materials, primary sources, exhibitions, and documentary films over nearly six decades.
In 2022, the NEH began developing a new “Public Access Plan.” This plan was spurred by a 2022 memo sent by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) (See Attachment C.1). to all federal agencies. OSTP called on all federal grant makers to establish plans that “ensure free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research.” The Public Access Plan will bring NEH in line with other research funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, which have required public access for over a decade.
Specifically, for the purposes of this SOO, the OSTP memo and the resulting NEH Public Access Plan will require NEH grantees who publish the results of their research in a peer-reviewed journal to submit a copy of the article (along with its metadata) to the NEH to be stored in an NEH Designated Repository (NDR).
To that end, with this SOO, the NEH is seeking to partner with an existing, established scholarly repository that already has a significant base of humanities journal articles and users with a professional affiliation in the humanities. Having an established partner with experience running a humanities-oriented repository will ensure that the NEH-funded articles can be discovered and used by the widest-possible audience seeking humanities-related content.
