The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Public Access policy is intended to expand public access to the results of its federally-funded research. This aligns with the Foundation’s long-standing commitment to clear and open communication of research results, which is central to fulfilling NSF’s primary mission of promoting the progress of science, advancing the frontiers of knowledge, and helping to ensure the nation’s future prosperity.

NSF’s Public Access policy requires NSF-funded investigators to deposit peer-reviewed, published journal articles and juried conference papers in the NSF Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR). NSF-PAR was launched in late 2015 in partnership with the Department of Energy (DoE) to enable NSF-funded investigators to meet this deposit requirement and to include the relevant information in their annual and final project reports.

Public Access Expansion

Beginning on March 26, 2018, NSF authors who are jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE) can retrieve previously submitted final manuscripts from the DOE system and pull them into NSF-PAR to meet NSF’s Public Access requirement. When an author indicates they have deposited a record into the DOE E-Link system and a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) match is found, the system will upload it to NSF-PAR for submission. The uploaded record will also be linked automatically to the project report associated with the award. This integration will only be available for jointly-funded publications by NSF and DOE, but future efforts will engage additional agencies.

Additional information is available on the Research.gov “About Public Access” page and in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) (NSF 18-041) on the NSF.gov website.

For IT system-related questions, please contact the NSF Help Desk at 1-800-381-1532 or rgov@nsf.gov. Policy-related questions should be directed to policy@nsf.gov.