Per NSF Notice 26-202, NSF’s policy on public access to research products (Public Access Policy) reflects the Foundation’s commitment to making certain that, to the extent possible, the American public, industry and the scientific community have access to the results of Federally funded scientific research. Pursuant to this policy, recipients must ensure the following for research products arising from NSF awards:

• Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) Deposit: Final versions of manuscripts accepted for publication after peer-review in either scholarly journals or juried conference papers or workshop proceedings (collectively referred to as author’s accepted manuscripts or AAMs) must be deposited in NSF’s Public Access Repository (PAR) at or before the time of publication. Further, such deposits are required for these products to be included as part of the annual project reporting process.
• Deposit of AAMs into PAR fulfills NSF public access requirements for publications and does not require payment of special fees to publishers or other third parties. Special fees for the purpose of making published versions of record (VORs) publicly accessible are allowable costs but such payments are not required for deposits of AAMs in PAR.
• Dataset Sharing: Scientific datasets underlying peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research should be made publicly available as per the Data Management and Sharing Plan (See PAPPG Chapter II.D.2.i(ii)) of the associated award.
• Persistent Identifiers (PIDs): Existing PIDs associated with any PAR entry must be included in the PAR record (e.g., a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) assigned to a VOR). Researchers are encouraged to deposit datasets in online repositories which assign them a PID. If no PIDs are associated with an item being deposited in PAR, minimal descriptive metadata (see below) should be entered manually. Note that upon the completion of a PAR deposit, the new entry is assigned a PARID that also functions as a PID.
• Metadata: AAMs and datasets should possess a minimum set of descriptive metadata elements as specified in the annual project reporting requirements. These metadata elements are normally supplied automatically via the PID; if one is not yet available at the time of submission to PAR, metadata must be manually entered.

If you have questions regarding NSF’s public access policy, or Bates resources to assist in compliance with it, please contact Shonna Humphrey (shumphre@bates.edu) or Krystie Wilfong (kwilfong@bates.edu).