What We Do
Building Community
The ORFG connects funders in a community focused on open research practice, discussion, and collaboration, and fosters partnerships with related groups, like the National Academies Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship, HELIOS Open, and ICOR. Members are welcome to participate in “deep dive” subgroups that explore and examine topics such as open infrastructure.
Facilitating Knowledge Exchange
The ORFG offers members opportunities to learn about open research policies and practices in the global research community from policymakers, higher education, institutions, global organizations and initiatives, and more. Members receive news roundups relevant to their interests in philanthropy, open research, and scholarly outputs.
Extending Influence
The alignment of funding priorities and its impact on policymakers and institutions is of keen interest to ORFG members. The ORFG helps facilitate funding alignment and national and international dialogues on open research. The ORFG supports members in public engagement—to share funder perspectives and goals, and to learn from public perspectives, priorities, and knowledge.
Projects and Tools
Projects
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This report analyzes access-to-research policies of ORFG members and other private funders of open research and open outputs.
The report finds that funders' policies have increasingly shifted from recommending open practices to requiring them. As an example, preprint requirements have increased 18% since the ORFG’s 2023 member policy analysis. While there have been improvements in funder policies supporting a more open ecosystem, there is continued work to do and improvements that funders can make in their policies.
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Coming soon!
Tools
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Our 2025-2026 Annual Report reflects the collaborative efforts ORFG has engaged in as a community as we have worked to strengthen connections, engage in learning and knowledge exchange, and extend influence in the research community for the greater use and adoption of open practices and behaviors.
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Explore the access-to-research policies in force at ORFG member organizations. These policies provide a breadth of private funder policy examples addressing publications, data sharing, and more.
Frequently Asked Questions
General
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Funder access-to-research policies promote the unfettered distribution and sharing of research outputs. These policies typically encompass both research articles that summarize the results of scientific and scholarly investigation (commonly known as “open access”) and the factual information from which research findings are derived, including datasets, software, and code (“open data”).
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The open sharing of research outputs benefits society by getting more information quickly and widely into the hands of researchers, practitioners, patients, students, and policy makers. This accelerates the pace of discovery, reduces information-sharing gaps, and encourages innovation. Ensuring that open sharing includes data and code has the additional benefit of promoting research reproducibility. This helps validate new findings and allows others to strengthen experiments for follow-on research.
Research funders are adopting open policies because these policies align with their mission and values. Many funders have bold strategic goals aimed at tackling society’s most challenging problems. Open policies lower knowledge barriers and make it easier for interested parties to pursue promising investigative directions that benefit society. These policies reduce unnecessary duplication by making previous findings and data easier to discover. They reduce the potential for data miscalculation, misinterpretation, manipulation, and fraud by making raw results available to the broader community. Getting more research outputs into the hands of more researchers, with fewer barriers, makes it easier for scientists and scholars to do their jobs. This, in turn, makes it more likely that funders will attain mission-aligned impact that best serves their communities.
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A well-considered funder policy will specify how and when a funder expects its grant recipients to share research articles resulting from funding, as well as the underlying data, code, and software needed for independent verification of research results. Further, such a policy will detail expectations for how these materials can be reused, how costs associated with policy compliance will be borne, and the extent to which the funder will monitor policy compliance.
It is critical to note that funder policies need not adhere to a rigid ideology in order to be considered open. Funders can take a range of approaches to each of these issues. What matters most is affirming a commitment to the open sharing of research outputs and underscoring this commitment’s consistency with organizational values.
Program Officers, Managers & Staff
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Policy changes can create additional administrative work. Policy development requires internal discussions, workflow integration, and compliance checks. However, after the initial development and integration of a policy into your workflows, its benefits outweigh the upkeep. There are new tools and innovative ways to more easily manage open policies, such as repository integrations, grant-management platforms, automated article checks, reporting dashboards, etc. Several ORFG members have integrated these tools, and they are often discussed at ORFG meetings and between members.
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There is no evidence to suggest, drawing from the hundreds of funding bodies that have adopted open policies, that the quantity or quality of grant applicants has been adversely affected by these additional requirements. Every organization already places certain conditions on the projects it funds. Examples include periodic reporting, acknowledgment of funding support on public outputs, and biosecurity risk mitigation. The implementation of an open policy is an incremental addition to these terms and conditions. Many federal agencies and universities are adopting similar policies, which means that prospective grant applicants are becoming increasingly familiar with these types of requirements.
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While tracking open policy may seem difficult, there is a growing support system to help alleviate this burden. Tools and technologies are being developed to more easily and effectively facilitate policy in the grant-making process. Policy does not have to be one-size-fits-all—there is a spectrum of approaches, allowing you to craft the policy that best fits your institution.
Foundation Leadership
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There is no one correct way to integrate open sharing into organizational priorities. Each organization is unique in its structure, alignment, and approach. Therefore, organizational integrations will each be unique. That being said, it is pertinent to frame the argument for open with your leadership and governing board.
Some examples of integrating open into organizational priorities include (but are not limited to):
Developing an access-to-research policy that requires open output sharing
Incorporating open into grant agreements, including budget line items
Allocating appropriate human and financial resources to support open initiatives
Investing in long-term impact monitoring beyond the award lifecycle.
More ideas and resources to support this development can be found on our website, and are often discussed during ORFG monthly member calls.
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Some funding organizations have introduced training, workshops, and presentations to support awardees in policy compliance. This takes human resources to develop, deliver, and evaluate. Adopting and implementing open policies is a human endeavor, and should be adequately resources to provide awardee support. For more ideas see our current and past projects that highlight practical tools in support of open.
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A core priority of board trustees is holding the organization accountable as good stewards of its research investments. Open policies directly address this concern by connecting openness to stewardship, mission, impact, risk, and accountability. The impact of which is to ensure the wide and equitable dissemination of the work the foundation supports.
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There is a range of activities that funders can undertake to oversee open policies. At the low-touch end of the spectrum, funders can require grant recipients to document their plans for compliance. Depending on internal resources, some funders spot-check these plans, while others rely on grantee self-reporting. Other organizations take a more engaged approach, requiring proof of compliance from grant recipients and checking this against internal expectations and guidelines. Funders without open policies may view administration and compliance as daunting tasks. However, each organization can make its own appropriate determination of the resources it can devote to these activities. Organizations like the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) can provide support and insight into best practices and available resources. The ORFG can also work with you to determine which parts of your organization (e.g., legal, finance, operations) should be engaged in policy formulation and oversight, as well as how to engage them productively.