Achieving Public Access: The Department of Energy Launches DOE PAGES(Beta) | OSTI.GOV

"As of August 4, 2014, and for the first time ever, the Department of Energy (DOE) will provide a portal (see above) allowing anyone to read, download, and analyze in digital form final peer-reviewed manuscripts or final published articles of work sponsored by the Department.  You can read the entire DOE Public Access Plan here.

DOE conducts more than $10 billion a year in R&D, and the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) helps ensure a return on those investments by making DOE-sponsored R&D results available in web-based searchable databases.  These DOE databases include electronic full-text research reports; energy citations going back to the Manhattan Project era; e-prints (journal article pre-publication drafts, scholarly papers, and more); DOE R&D accomplishments; and DOE patents.

Despite the breadth of these collections, they generally do not include what is considered the "gold standard" of scientific communication -- peer-reviewed journal articles or final accepted manuscripts resulting from agency funding.  To date, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the only federal science agency that has offered broad public access to scientific publications resulting from its funding (as required by a law enacted in 2008).

But now, that's all changed with DOE PAGESBeta (Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science).  And this is a very significant change.  After a twelve-month embargo period, readers will have access to journal articles (the Version of Record) or accepted manuscripts resulting from DOE research funding.  Historically, most of this collection of DOE-affiliated articles -- we estimate over 20,000 per year -- has been available only through subscription, which can run hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a year, or through purchase of a single article.  These articles, once behind a perpetual paywall, will now be freely available to the public, after this twelve-month interval...."