Many of you may have already seen, or even read, the NSF Public Access Plan 2.0. This document, disseminated last week, is the National Science Foundation’s response to the OSTP Public Access Memo from August 2022, which requires all federal grant funding agencies to make research publications and their supporting data freely available and accessible, without embargo, no later than December 31, 2025. The public access plan is not the agency’s new policies, but rather the framework for how they will improve public access and address the new requirements. The agency states they will accomplish this prior to the December deadline, on January 31, 2025. I have highlighted just a few points from the report below.
- The agency will leverage the existing NSF Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR) to make research papers, either the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM) or the publisher’s version of record (VOR), available immediately. All papers will be available in machine-readable XML, which will make additional research through text and data mining (TDM) possible.
- The agency will continue to leverage relationships with long-standing disciplinary and generalist data repositories, like Dryad.
- All data and publications will have permanent identifiers (PIDS). Data PIDS will be included with the article metadata.
- The agency acknowledges the complexity in size, type, and quality of documentation with data. Publishing a dataset has far greater technical variability than publishing a manuscript. The agency will continue to explore how to best address data in the next two years.
- The NSF has long required data management plans (DMPs). DMPs will be renamed to “data management and sharing plans,” or DMSPs, to better describe the required documentation and align with other agencies, like the NIH.
The above bullets are a mere 5 items in the lengthy report. Most importantly, over this next year, the Data Collaboration Team will develop an inreach plan to ensure all librarians and staff know how the OSTP memo and resulting policy will impact them and their researchers. Following awareness within the library, we will work on developing a coordinated outreach approach to support our researchers as they adapt to new requirements. This work will be in coordination with the Office of Scholarly Communication Services, the Research Data Management Program, and other longstanding LDSP partners.
Please let us know if you have any questions by sending them to librarydataservices@berkeley.