Dec 8 -- The comment period is extended to January 19, 2024.
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-26940
Nov 16 -- The National Science Foundation (NSF) is seeking public input from the science and engineering research and education community on implementing NSF Public Access Plan 2.0: Ensuring Open, Immediate, and Equitable Access to National Science Foundation Funded Research. This plan represents an update to NSF current public access requirements in response to recent White House Office of Science and Technology Policy guidance. A primary consideration during the development of NSF's plan has been potential equity impacts of public access requirements. NSF's goal is to improve equity throughout the research life cycle, making data and opportunities available to all researchers, including those from marginalized communities and historically under-resourced institutions of higher education in the U.S. NSF is committed to considering the needs of the diverse US research community, including identifying possible unintended consequences that the plan and its implementation could produce.
Interested persons or organizations are invited to submit comments on or before 11:59 p.m. (EST) on January 2, 2024.
The U.S. National Science Foundation Public Access Plan 2.0: Ensuring Open, Immediate, and Equitable Access to National Science Foundation Funded Research has been prepared in response to the memorandum dated August 25, 2022, from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, titled Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, and signed by Alondra Nelson. It updates NSF's original public access plan, Today's Data, Tomorrow's Discoveries: Increasing Access to the Results of Research Funded by the National Science Foundation, dated March 18, 2015.
Broadly, Public Access Plan 2.0: Ensuring Open, Immediate, and Equitable Access to National Science Foundation Funded Research describes how:
• all peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from NSF-funded research will be made freely available and publicly accessible by default in the NSF Public Access Repository, or NSF–PAR, without embargo;
• such publications will be accessible for assistive technologies;
• scientific data associated with peer-reviewed publications resulting from NSF awards will be made available in disciplinary repositories;
• exceptions to the data-sharing requirements will be made based on legal, privacy, ethical, intellectual property and national security considerations; and
• persistent identifiers, or PIDs, and other critical information associated with peer-reviewed publications and data resulting from NSF-funded research will be collected and made publicly available in NSF–PAR.
NSF is committed to ensuring that its approach to public access enhances equity in the science and engineering ecosystem and wants to understand any potential barriers that may be faced by researchers in complying with new public access requirements. Responses may suggest areas of particular interest to the research community that inspire future NSF funding opportunities and development plans for NSF–PAR.
NSF seeks responses from all interested individuals and communities including—but not limited to—individual researchers, research institutions, libraries, scholarly societies, scholarly publishers, early career researchers, and students/educators. NSF is particularly interested in hearing from researchers new to public access at NSF, new to open science practices more generally, or working in fields or institutions with unique challenges in complying with public access requirements, to ensure that NSF is well-positioned to fully consider potential equity impacts as the plan is implemented.
Comments are welcome on all elements of NSF Public Access Plan 2.0 but would be particularly welcome for the issues/questions identified below. . . .
NSF Public Access:
https://new.nsf.gov/public-access
NSF Public Access Plan 2.0:
https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2023/nsf23104/nsf23104.pdf
FRN:
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-25267