The preservation of and public access to publications produced from SMD-funded scientific activities supports the scientific process, assures the widest dissemination of the information that NASA produces, and supports anyone, anywhere in reading the results of NASA scientific activities. This section contains supplemental guidance to support the implementation of requirements for public access to publications established by SPD-41a.
SPD-41a defines publications as scientific and technical documents released through print, electronic, or alternative media. This includes peer reviewed manuscripts, technical reports, conference materials, and books. This does not include laboratory notebooks, preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific papers or preprints, plans for future research, peer review reports, or communications with colleagues.
Under SPD-41a, all publications resulting from research funded by SMD shall be made publicly accessible to the extent allowed by applicable law and existing NASA policies. Peer reviewed manuscripts resulting from SMD-funded scientific activities shall be made freely available to the public by default, without any embargo or delay after the publication date.
Authors may meet this requirement in a number of ways (see How to Share Publications), whether or not their manuscript is published as Open Access (see Open Access Publishing). Ultimately, SMD-funded publications must be made publicly available at the time of publication via the NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Repository.
Authors have several options for how to make their publications publicly accessible in compliance with SPD-41a:
For articles that are published as Open Access (see Open Access Publishing), the final published article (i.e., the publisher’s version of record) may be made publicly available in the STI Repository through one of the following mechanisms:
- For articles published as Open Access by journal publishers participating in the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States (CHORUS), the published article will be made publicly available in the STI Repository on behalf of the authors. Authors should verify that their article is available in the STI Repository following its publication, in which case no further action is required by the author. View a list of journal publishers participating in CHORUS.
- For articles published as Open Access that are indexed in the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), no further action is required by the researcher to comply with public access requirements for the article at this time.
- For articles published as Open Access that are not covered by CHORUS or ADS, authors must submit either the final published article or the author's copy of an accepted manuscript to the STI Repository via the PubSpace submission page no later than the article’s publication date.
For articles that are not published as Open Access, the author’s copy of an accepted manuscript may be made publicly available in the STI Repository at the time of the article's acceptance for publication. The accepted manuscript is the final, peer-reviewed version of the article that has been accepted for publication by a publisher. The accepted manuscript includes all changes made during the peer review process and contains the same content as the final published article, but it does not include the publisher’s copyediting, stylistic, or formatting edits that will appear in the final journal publication (i.e., the version of record). In this scenario, authors must submit accepted manuscripts to the STI Repository via the PubSpace submission page no later than the article's publication date.
Further examples for how to make publications available will be provided as they are developed.
Open Access publications are defined here as those in which the publisher makes the article and related content available online, free of charges or other barriers to access, immediately at the time of publication. Such articles are often licensed for sharing and reuse under a Creative Commons or similar license-type agreement that allows the authors to retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and reuse their work. A short description of common Open Access publishing methods (e.g., Gold or Diamond/Platinum) is available from Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training.
Open Access publishing is not required to meet the public access requirements for peer-reviewed publications under SPD-41a. However, many publishers in Earth and Space science are moving toward Open Access models, and SMD-funded researchers are encouraged to publish their peer-reviewed manuscripts as Open Access (e.g., Gold or Diamond Open Access) in reputable journals. Costs for Open Access publishing may be included in the budgets of proposals for SMD funding.
SMD-funded researchers are encouraged to share their manuscripts as preprints as a best practice in open science, though this is not a requirement under SPD-41a. Common methods for sharing preprints include posting to community-appropriate preprint servers such as arXiv or the Earth and Space Science Open Archive. Because the content of an article may change substantially during the peer-review process, authors must ensure that the accepted version of their peer-reviewed publication is made accessible via one of the options described above even if they previously shared a pre-acceptance preprint.