NSF Provides Overview of Its Public Access Policy and Public Access Repository Requirements

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Public Access Policy reflects NSF’s commitment to ensuring that the American public, industry, and scientific community have access to federally funded scientific research results.

As such, NSF requires principal investigators to deposit a copy of any peer-reviewed journal publication (either the final accepted version or the version of record) or any juried conference paper into the NSF Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR) in order to report that publication or conference paper in annual or final project reports.

NSF has also developed a streamlined process to support publication and related metadata entry in annual and final project reports.

Grantees must ensure that articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers in juried conference proceedings comply with the following:

• Are deposited in a public access compliant repository (as identified in the Public Access Policy)
• Are available for download, reading, and analysis within 12 months of publication
• Possess a minimum set of machine-readable metadata elements as described in the Public Access Policy
• Are reported in annual and final reports with a persistent identifier

For more information regarding NSF’s Public Access Policy or Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR), see the Public Access website.