By Allan Barclay, Ebling Library
New Requirements to Make Work and Data More Transparent and Reusable
April 2015 – The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently released a set of public access requirements for researchers applying for grants with an effective date on or after January 2016. According to the plan, entitled Today’s Data, Tomorrow’s Discoveries, the objectives of increasing public-accessibility are to make research and data easier for other investigators and educational institutions to use, and spur innovation from these same communities.
The NSF sees these requirements as the “initial implementation” of a framework that will change and grow over time to include additional research products and degree of accessibility.
The scope of the plan is initially focused on four types of outcome products:
- Articles in peer-reviewed journals
- Papers accepted as part of juried conference proceedings
- Articles/juried papers in conference proceedings authored entirely or in part by NSF employees
- Data generated and curated as part of an NSF-required Data Management Plan (DMP).
Researchers who receive all or partial NSF funding will be required to
- Deposit either the version of record or final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript of these products in a public access compliant repository as designated by the NSF. At this time, the NSF has designated the Department of Energy’s PAGES (Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science) system as their designated repository.
- Make these outcome products freely available for download, reading and analysis no later than 12 months after initial publication.
- Provide a minimum level of machine-readable metadata with each product at the time of initial publication.
- Ensure the long-term preservation of products.
- Provide a unique persistent identifier to all products in the award annual and final reports.
The NSF expects that investigators will be able to deposit research products into the PAGES system by the end of the 2015 calendar year. Data underling journal article or conference paper findings should be deposited in a repository as specified by the publication or as described in the research proposal’s DMP.
Public access requirement specifics will be provided in future NSF documents and grant solicitations.
For more information on how these new requirements could affect your grant proposal, contact the solicitation’s Cognizant Program Officer or the UW-Madison’s Research Data Services.