There is good news for researchers and analysts looking for research papers produced or sponsored by the government. The National Institute for Standards and Technology will be establishing a “free-to-read” repository of academic articles.

NIST’s public access plan is aimed to comply with policy directives from the White House regarding open access to the results of research funded by the federal government. The agency will partner with the National Institutes of Health to use the existing PubMed Central as the repository of full-text peer-reviewed scholarly publications for NIST, leveraging the search, archival and dissemination features of PMC.

Articles with research and reporting funded by NIST will be archived for free on an NIST server beginning in October 2016. However, access to archived journal articles will begin only after a 12-month embargo from the date of the paper’s publication.

NIST’s plan for providing public access to data consists of three components:

Data management plans providing documentation of plans for storage, archival and accessibility for NIST’s multiple types of data.

An enterprise data inventory, which is a catalog of the datasets that are generated via NIST-sponsored research that will let researchers link those datasets to the scientific literature and other datasets.

A common access platform that will deliver a production-level infrastructure populated with persistent identifiers and metadata for all publicly available NIST data, and will provide for interoperability within NIST and potentially with other federal agencies.

The Department of Energy signed an agreement with CHORUS, the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States, to provide indexing and public access to research articles that acknowledge DOE funding. CHORUS will supply an ongoing feed of DOE-affiliated journal article metadata and links to full-text articles on publisher websites. “Formalizing this collaboration can only propel our acquisition process leading to more comprehensive coverage of the landscape of articles,” Jeffrey Salmon, of the Department of Energy Office of Science, wrote in a related blog post.

NASA and the Department of Defense are also adapting online databases to host unclassified research articles.

Sorce: GCN

After a decade of often fierce debate over whether the public should have free access to the scientific papers produced by their tax dollars, advocates for so-called open access celebrated a notable victory last month: The National Science Foundation (NSF) unveiled a plan to require its grantees to make their research freely available. NSF’s move meant that the federal agencies that provide the bulk of the nation’s basic and applied research funding have now complied with a 2013 White House order to make the peer-reviewed papers they fund freely available within 12 months of publication. The order, which applies to federal agencies that spend more than $100 million a year on research and development, will ultimately make hundreds of thousands of scientific papers once hidden behind paywalls available to anyone with an Internet connection. For the typical U.S. scientist with a federal research grant, the new public access mandate means they will need to follow the example of researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Since 2008, NIH grantees have been required to send their accepted manuscripts or final published paper to the agency’s PubMed Central full-text archive. Researchers may deposit the paper themselves through a special Web portal, or the journal may do it for them. At most agencies, those who ignore the mandate will not get credit for their papers during reviews of funding proposals or job performance. The details of how the public will get access to the full-text papers vary by agency. Some, including NASA, will share papers through a full-text archive similar to PubMed Central, which has grown to hold more than 3 million full-text papers. Open-access advocates prefer this model because they say it allows for simpler text and data mining across an entire corpus of articles. But two agencies, NSF and the Department of Energy, have heeded concerns from publishers that full-text archives will divert eyeballs from their sites and cut into advertising revenue. They are building portals that provide only a paper’s abstract and other metadata; links will take users to the full-text article on the publisher’s website.

Sorce: Science

EUA this week launched the ‘Open Access checklist for universities: A practical guide on implementation’, a concise document to support universities in developing institutional policies on Open Access to research publications.

The Open Access checklist is addressed to higher education and research institutions that are developing, or planning to develop, a policy on Open Access to research publications. It is intended as a general guide in the development of institutional policies on Open Access and can be useful for different stakeholders, including the leadership, administration, librarians and researchers.

The checklist contains key information on Open Access, such as benefits, challenges and ways of implementing it, as well as strategic, practical and economic aspects that should be considered when developing Open Access policy. It also includes links to resources and highlights some of the main findings of the EUA survey on Open Access conducted in 2014.

The checklist complements and extends previous EUA work in this field. Specifically, in the context of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between EUA and the European Commission in 2012, EUA committed to encourage universities to implement Open Access policies at the institutional level and created a taskforce composed of experts representing three National Rectors’ Conferences (France, CPU; Netherlands, VSNU; and the French Community of Belgium, CRef) to monitor developments.

In September 2014, EUA published a briefing paper on Open Access to research publications, focusing on European policy developments, and later that year a survey addressed to EUA universities was conducted on the implementation of Open Access policies. The survey results highlighted a need for practical guidelines on Open Access implementation and the checklist was developed to address that concern.

Looking ahead, EUA’s work in this area will include a re-launch of the Open Access survey, foreseen for autumn 2015, in order to gather a longitudinal perspective on the development and implementation of Open Access policies in European universities. In addition, and building on the work of the taskforce, a new expert group with a broader remit is being established. The new group will focus on topics such as the ‘Science 2.0′ movement, open data and text and data mining, and will provide support to EUA in the EU-level dialogue on Open Access.

Sorce: European University Association

Springer SBM and Jisc have agreed an arrangement to take into account UK scientists’ need to comply with multiple open access policies while accessing scientific articles published by Springer, while containing the combined costs of article processing charges and subscriptions.

The proposed agreement will cap the amount paid by UK higher education (HE) institutions to subscribe and maintain full access to Springer’s subscription journals and to make their researchers’ articles open access in those journals – the latter being in compliance with the requirements of HEFCE’s Research Excellence Framework, RCUK’s open access policy and other major funders such as the Charity Open Access Fund.

The two parties hope the agreement will significantly reduce the cost and administration barriers to hybrid open access publishing for UK academic institutions, while supporting the transition to open access in a transparent and sustainable way.

Jisc and Springer first entered into negotiations in response to changes to the UK’s open access requirements in early 2014. Jisc supports education and research through digital services, and approached Springer with a clear mandate and objectives to contain the costs to UK institutions.

‘Springer is proud to work so closely with Jisc on this new direction in science publishing,’ says Roné Robbetze, vice president for sales in north-western Europe and Africa. ‘The UK has taken a major step in further developing open access and we are happy to be the first to have such a far-reaching arrangement here.’

Lorraine Estelle, executive director of digital resources and divisional CEO of Jisc Collections, added: ‘Jisc sees the development of these models as essential in order to contain the total cost of ownership of scholarly communication. Springer has shown a deep understanding of the issue and contributed proactively in finding a model that addresses the needs of UK higher education institutions as they lead in the transition to open access.’

Sorce: Research information

The EU FP-7 project RECODE has released findings of its case studies in open access to research data. RECODE (Policy RECommendations for Open Access to Research Data in Europe) held its final conference last week in Athens, coinciding with publication of a short booklet summarising the project findings and the following ten over-arching recommendations:

-Develop aligned and comprehensive policies for open access to research data

-Ensure appropriate funding for open access to research data

-Develop policies and initiatives that offer researchers rewards for open access to high quality data

-Identify key stakeholders and relevant networks and foster collaborative work for a sustainable ecosystem for open access to research data

-Plan for the long-term, sustainable curation and preservation of open access data

-Develop comprehensive and collaborative technical and infrastructure solutions that afford open access to and long-term preservation of high-quality research data

-Develop technical and scientific quality standards for research data

-Require the use of harmonized open licensing frameworks

-Systematically address legal and ethical issues arising from open access to research data

-Support the transition to open research data through curriculum-development and training

The RECODE publication offers more specific recommendations aimed at each of the key stakeholders it has targeted, namely research funders, research institutions, data managers, and publishers. The project recommendations were informed by five disciplinary case studies (physics, health, bioengineering, environment and archaeology). These drew comparisons across four “grand challenges”:

-stakeholders values and ecosystems

-legal and ethical concerns

-infrastructure and technology challenges, and

-institutional challenges

Case studies identified two overarching issues in the mobilisation of open access to research data; firstly a “lack of a coherent open data ecosystem”, and secondly; “lack of attention to the specificity of research practice, processes and data collections”.

Source: RECODE