NSF unveils plan to make scientific papers free

The National Science Foundation released a long-anticipated policy that will require its grantees to make their peer-reviewed research papers freely available within 12 months of publication in a journal.

The agency is not creating its own public archive of full-text papers, but instead will send those searching for papers to publishers’ own websites. Although that’s what most observers expected, it’s not what open-access advocates hoped for. “I’m disappointed,” says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), a group which represents academic libraries. But scientific publishers who worry that full-text archives will harm journal revenues praised the plan. “This is a very good way to do things because it minimizes the cost to taxpayers without having to duplicate existing infrastructure,” says Frederick Dylla, CEO of the American Institute of Physics and a board member of a coalition of publishers that runs CHORUS (Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States), a system for providing links to papers on journal’s sites.

The announcement marks a milestone: It means that essentially all of the major US federal science agencies now have a public-access policy.