National Science Foundation Releases Plan for Public Access to NSF-Funded Research | Association of Research Libraries® | ARL®

"Today, March 18, 2015, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) released, 'NSF’s Public Access Plan: Today’s Data, Tomorrow’s Discoveries—Increasing Access to the Results of Research Funded by the National Science Foundation' (PDF). The detailed and thorough plan presents how NSF and the researchers it funds will meet the requirements of the February 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum on enhancing public access to federally funded research. NSF is collaborating with the US Department of Energy (DOE) in making NSF-funded, peer-reviewed journal articles—either final, accepted manuscripts or the version of record—publicly available. NSF-funded researchers will be required to deposit their peer-reviewed articles and juried conference papers in DOE PAGES (Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science) in PDF/A format and then report that deposit has occurred to NSF through annual and final project reports. NSF employees will also be required to deposit peer-reviewed articles and juried papers in PAGES. Future expansions of the NSF public access plan may designate other repository services in addition to PAGES. Voluntary submission will be available by the end of calendar year 2015; submission will be mandatory for articles and juried conference proceedings resulting from proposals submitted, or due, on or after January 2016. Publications resulting from NSF-funded research will be required to: 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 unique persistent identifierthat provides links to the full text of the publication as well as other metadata elements ..."