NASA releases Public Access Plan

By on February 24, 2015 in Science

NASA released its Public Access Plan February 11, 2015, in compliance with the White House Directive. The policy covers both publications and data.nasa logo

Publications

NASA’s plan requires that authors make final peer-reviewed accepted journal manuscripts (or, by publisher agreement, the final published version of record) openly accessible.

  • The articles must be available no later than 12 months following publication, unless there is a successful petition by a publisher for a longer embargo period.
  • Access will be through a NASA portal to the PubMed Central (PMC) platform.
  • The “system will ensure that the public can read, download, and analyze [the articles] in digital form” with “bulk downloads for research purposes… permitted as an acceptable use.”

Data

All proposals or project plans submitted to NASA now are “required to include a Data Management Plan (DMP) that describes whether and how data generated through the course of the proposed research will be shared and preserved (including timeframe).”

  • The policy focuses on “research data that underlie the results and findings in peer-reviewed publications.”
  • This data must be accessible at the time of publication or “within a reasonable time period.”
  • Data can be made available via a journal publisher, through NASA archives, or another data repository.
  • As January 1, 2015, terms and conditions of funding for grants, contracts, directed research projects, and other agreements include these requirements.

Whitehouse Office of Science and Technology Policy Directive

The NASA policy is the latest issued under the White House directive on open access to publications and data that requires Federal agencies with annual spending of more than $100M in Research & Development to develop plans to make the data and publications that flow from the research they fund openly available to the public.

Major policies that affect MIT researchers will be summarized on the scholarly publishing website as they emerge.

The Libraries can help you comply with these new requirements:

If you have comments or questions, please contact:

For publications: contact Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing, Copyright, and Licensing, MIT Libraries

For data: contact the MIT Libraries’ data management team