National Science Foundation Policy Plan for Public Access to NSF Funded Research
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has recently developed a plan, “Today’s Data, Tomorrow’s Discoveries,” to increase public access to scientific publications and data from research they fund. This plan was written to be consistent with objectives set forth in the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Feb. 22, 2013, memorandum, “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research,” and with long-standing policies encouraging data sharing and communication of research results.
Requirements in the plan include “that either the version of record or the final accepted manuscript in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers in juried conference proceedings or transactions must:
- Be deposited in a public access compliant repository designated by NSF;
- Be available for download, reading and analysis free of charge no later than 12 months after initial publication;
- Possess a minimum set of machine-readable metadata elements in a metadata record to be made available free of charge upon initial publication;
- Be managed to ensure long-term preservation; and
- Be reported in annual and final reports during the period of the award with a persistent identifier that provides links to the full text of the publication as well as other metadata elements.”
More information about this new plan is available on the NSF website.
