Somehow this seems to have slipped under the radar: National Science Foundation announces plan for comprehensive public access to research results. They put it up on 18 March, two whole months ago, so our apologies for not having said anything until now!

This is the NSF’s rather belated response to the OSTP memo on Open Access, back in January 2013. This memo required all Federal agencies that spend $100 million in research and development each year to develop OA policies, broadly in line with the existing one of the NIH which gave us PubMed Central. Various agencies have been turning up with policies, but for those of us in palaeo, the NSF’s the big one — I imagine it funds more palaeo research than all the others put together.

So far, so awesome. But what exactly is the new policy? The press release says papers must “be deposited in a public access compliant repository and be available for download, reading and analysis within one year of publication”, but says nothing about what repository should be used. It’s lamentable that a full year’s embargo has been allowed, but at least the publishers’ CHORUS land-grab hasn’t been allowed to hobble the whole thing.

There’s a bit more detail here, but again it’s oddly coy about where the open-access works will be placed: it just says they must be “deposited in a public access compliant repository designated by NSF”. The executive summary of the actual plan also refers only to “a designated repository”

Only in the full 31-page plan itself does the detail emerge. From page 5:

In the initial implementation, NSF has identified the Department of Energy’s PAGES (Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science) system as its designated repository and will require NSF-funded authors to upload a copy of their journal articles or juried conference paper to the DOE PAGES repository in the PDF/A format, an open, non-proprietary standard (ISO 19005-1:2005). Either the final accepted version or the version of record may be submitted. NSF’s award terms already require authors to make available copies of publications to the Cognizant Program Officers as part of the current reporting requirements. As described more fully in Sections 7.8 and 8.2, NSF will extend the current reporting system to enable automated compliance.

Future expansions, described in Section 7.3.1, may provide additional repository services. The capabilities offered by the PAGES system may also be augmented by services offered by third parties.

So what is good and bad about this?

Good. It makes sense to me that they’re re-using an existing system rather than wasting resources and increasing fragmentation by building one of their own.

Bad. It’s a real shame that they mandate the use of PDF, “the hamburger that we want to turn back into a cow”. It’s a terrible format for automated analysis, greatly inferior to the JATS XML format used by PubMed Central. I don’t understand this decision at all.

Then on page 9:

In the initial implementation, NSF has identified the DOE PAGES system to support managing journal articles and juried conference papers. In the future, NSF may add additional partners and repository services in a federated system.

I’m not sure where this points. In an ideal world, it would mean some kind of unifying structure between PAGES and PubMed Central and whatever other repositories the various agencies decide to use.

Anyone else have thoughts?

Update from Peter Suber, later that day

Over on Google+, Peter Suber comments on this post. With his permission, I reproduce his observations here:

My short take on the policy’s weaknesses:

• will use Dept of Energy PAGES, which at least for DOE is a dark archive pointing to live versions at publisher web sites
• plans to use CHORUS (p. 13) in addition to DOE PAGES
• requires PDF
• silent on open licensing
• only mentions reuse for data (pp. v, 18), not articles, and only says it will explore reuse
• silent on reuse for articles even tho it has a license (p. 10) authorizing reuse
• silent on the timing of deposits

I agree with you that a 12 month embargo is too long. But that’s the White House recommended default. So I blame the White House for this, not NSF.

To be more precise, PAGES favors publisher-controlled OA in one way, and CHORUS does it in another way. Both decisions show the effect of publisher lobbying on the NSF, and its preference for OA editions hosted by publishers, not OA editions hosted by sites independent of publishers.

So all in all, the NSF policy is much less impressive than I’d initially thought and hoped.