National Science Foundation announces plan for comprehensive public access to research results

This is good news. It’s unfair that government-funded studies get published in private databases that make money off of the public’s desire to access results of studies paid for by our taxes.

NSF will require that articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers in juried conference proceedings or transactions be deposited in a public access compliant repository and be available for download, reading and analysis within one year of publication.

Today’s announcement follows a request from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy last year, directing science-funding agencies to develop plans to increase access to the results of federally funded research. NSF submitted its proposal to improve the management of digital data and received approval to implement the plan. —NSF