I would like to propose that PKP and the U.S. Department of Education collaborate to produce an OJS plugin that deposits journal articles from education research funded by the US Department of Education into the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), an online library of education research and information, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education.
Why do we need this feature?
Starting in January, 2026, articles that result from research funded by the US Department of Education are required to be deposited in ERIC immediately upon publication. For more information, please see section 8.2 of the U.S. Department of Education Plan for Public Access: Improving Access to Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research. This research can result in articles concerning traditional educational topics, but also those in the health, sports, and recreation sciences.
Who will benefit from this feature?
Publishers/editors of any OJS journal that publishes research funded by the U.S. Dept. of Education after January, 2026. The U.S. Department of Education is one of the largest funders of research in higher education, so this plugin could benefit OJS journals that publish this research and those researchers that wish to publish in open access journals.
Who might be impacted by this feature?
This feature would allow researchers publishing in our journals to easily comply with U.S. federal mandates. Not complying would result in a loss of funding for future DoE research projects. Journals that can provide these services will be preferenced by researchers over those who make the researchers deposit their own articles into ERIC.
Does this proposal benefit the whole community or just one segment of it?
This proposal benefits the segments of the community that publish educational, health, sport, and exercise science research funded by the US Department of Education. The ability to deposit in ERIC could enhance the stature of open access education journals in OJS and even the playing field with commercial journals.
Hi @mreedks,
Do you know if ERIC has a deposit API? At a glance, I don’t see one.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
ERIC has an API for searching the repository, but it doesn’t look like it’s used for deposit (yet). ERIC does have agreements with specific publishers/journals that submit on behalf of their authors, but it’s not clear to me what mechanism is used. Our Journal of Montessori Research is listed on that page, so I’ve asked the editor how the articles are currently sent to ERIC. DoE grantees that publish in journals that don’t submit on their behalf must submit to ERIC manually using their submission system. If OJS journals can brag that they submit to ERIC on behalf of the authors, it will put them on a more level playing field with the commercial publishers that do this already.
ERIC/Dept of Education/IES has had a policy in place for several years mandating that articles from research funded by DoE must be submitted to ERIC, where articles are currently made available with a 12 month embargo, but the new federal policy will require that, after January 1, 2026, those articles be made available immediately and include researcher identifiers such as ORCIDs, DOIs or other permanent article identifiers, etc. (The responsible parties are the PI’s of the grants, so if they are being reminded that they need to fulfill those obligations and upload the research to ERIC manually, I haven’t yet heard about it.)
Complicating this a bit further is the reality that not all articles published in education/health/sport/exercise science journals are funded by DoE, though ERIC seems to accept a lot of different types of materials, so maybe that doesn’t matter. What is very clear is the federal mandate to get things to ERIC upon publication so that they can be made immediately available.
I think that this situation gives PKP some opportunities to work with ERIC over the next 19 months to develop tools to allow OJS journals to upload content to ERIC, but I’m not sure what that collaboration would look like or if ERIC is even interested. I will let you know what my editor says about how her journal articles are currently being ingested into ERIC.
Best regards,
Marianne
I found out more about our existing connection with ERIC.
My editor does not do anything to add her journals articles to ERIC, so ERIC must be harvesting them in some way. Since there is a scholarly society involved, it is unclear whether there is payment to ERIC for these services, since it might be paid by the society without my editor’s knowledge.