To comply with new standards regarding open access to publicly funded research, the US Department of Energy has announced that it is creating a web-based portal to provide free access to accepted peer-reviewed manuscripts or published journal articles.
"Increasing access to the results of research funded by the Department of Energy will enable researchers and entrepreneurs to capitalize on our substantial research and development investments," says Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary, in a statement. “These new policies set the stage for increased innovation, commercial opportunities, and accelerated scientific breakthroughs.”
In early 2013, the White House announced that all federally funded research had to be made available to the public free of charge within a year of publication.
This new DOE portal, called Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science or PAGES, will link to PDF versions of papers at the publishers' websites — if they have been made freely available after 12 months — or at a repository at the DOE lab or grantee's university. The agency will be working with the publisher consortium Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States for access to publisher-hosted content.
This approach, critics say, will affect how papers can be used. For example, text-mining such papers may be difficult.
"The DOE's plan contains some steps in the right direction, but has some serious holes. Most critically, it doesn't adequately address the reuse rights needed for the public to do more than simply read individual articles," Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, tells ScienceInsider.