Public Access to Federally-Funded Research
The University of Akron is a community of scholars and supports the free and open exchange of ideas and results from scholarly activities. University of Akron Rule 3359-11-17. As part of that commitment, the University provides the following information.
In 2022, the President announced the Administration's commitment to advance open science. Finally, federal agencies, which award grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements, have been working on specific requirements for open science. Two of these specific requirements are that publications resulting from federal funding be made freely available (or "Open Access") and that data generated from such federal support be deposited in a freely available database when possible.
Additional information on open science requirements for various federal agencies is available below.
NSF
Required
- Depositing publications (e.g. peer-reviewed, published journal articles and juried conference papers), which result from NSF-funded projects, in to the NSF Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR) is a requirement.
- To access the NSF Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR), you need to sign in to Research.gov and choose ‘Deposit publication’ from My Desktop. Alternatively, you will be prompted within Project Reports to deposit publications in NSF-PAR when reporting journals or juried conference papers as published.
- How-to Guide for Depositing Publications into NSF-PAR.
- Data Management Plans (soon to be called Data Management and Sharing plans) are required for all proposal submissions.
- Each directorate and division has its own guidance. See the guidance links at this page.
Recommended
- Though adding datasets to NSF-PAR is currently recommended, NSF is working towards making such an addition a requirement.
- A bonus to adding datasets to NSF-PAR is that those added auto-populate into NSF in-progress reports in the Project Reporting System in Research.gov.
- Information for how to add Dataset information to NSF-PAR.
NIH
Required
- NIH policy on public access requires that there is a Data Management & Sharing Plan submitted with all proposals and that all publications be made available for free 12 months after initial publication.
- This policy applies to all peer-reviewed articles resulting from research supported in whole or in part with direct costs from NIH, including research grant and career development awards, cooperative agreements, contracts, Institutional and Individual Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards, SBIR/STTR awards, and NIH intramural research studies.
- NIH Grants Policy Statement on Public Access
- Data Management & Sharing Policy
- NIH-funded investigators are required by Federal law to submit (or have submitted for them) to PMC an electronic version of the final, peer-reviewed manuscript upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication.
- When and how to comply with the publication requirement.
- Data Management & Sharing Plans must be written and compliance with the approved plan must be achieved.
- The written plan should include six elements, including how data will be made available to the scientific community, as described at this page.
- More information about the written plan may be accessed here.
Recommended
Repository listing for NIH-Supported Data Repositories Note that these are encouraged by NIH.
NIH recognizes that some data do not fit well in an NIH-supported data repository. For guidance and generalized data repositories, navigate to the NIH Generalist Repositories webpage.
Additional Resources
Other Agency Policy & Guidance
- DoT Public Access Policy and FAQs
- DoT awardee PIs and key personnel must register for an ORCID before the research begins. The ORCID webpage contains information on how to obtain a free ORCID.
- DoT requires reporting of the research into the Research in Progress Database (RiP) before the research begins.
- Publications arising from DoT funding must be deposited into the National Transportation Library (NTL) digital repository. See the above links for more information
- DoD Public Access Policy
- Final, peer-reviewed manuscripts must be bsubmitted to the DoD system for open access. Generally, there is an embargo period of 12 months before this requirement must be met.
- The manuscript repository is the Defense Technical Information Center
- DoD Open Access FAQs
- NASA Public Access Policy
- All NASA-funded researchers are required to ensure that copies of publicatons and associated data are made available through NASA's publicly available databases.
- PubSpace is NASA's repository
Other Resources
- Because of its commitment to open science, the University of Akron Libraries has agreements with various publishers, which allow University of Akron researchers to publish their research as open access.
- More information on University of Akron open access agreements is available here.