Good news for curious people who want to know if there is life on Titan (the largest moon of Saturn) and what happens to hair follicles when a person goes into outer space? Now almost any question can be answered - numerous studies, funded by the space agency NASA, will now be available to everyone.
The space agency has created a new web portal called Pubspace, where anyone interested can find scientific articles on their subject. Agency-funded content will be posted on Pubspace for one year after official publication.
In 2013, the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy asked research funding agencies to develop a plan to increase access to research results. All research papers falling into this category were funded from the federal budget.
Now all works will be available in the Pubspace database, and users will not have to pay money to read them. In addition, all data will be available for download, subsequent reading or analysis within one year after the official publication of the work. This move is part of the agency's commitment to provide the public with access to the collected scientific data.
NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman said the agency welcomes the opportunity to expand access to its extensive portfolio of scientific and technical publications. “Through open access and innovation, we invite the global community to join us in exploring the Earth, atmosphere and space,” she says.
Note that discussions about the opening of access to scientific works are raised in many countries. Thus, "Vesti. Nauka" reported that the members of the European Union this year agreed on a new ambitious goal: all European research projects funded by the state should be freely available by 2020. All scientific works published with the support of the state or public-private foundations will be available for unlimited study. By the way, Russia entered the top five European countries in terms of the number of articles in the open access.
We cannot fail to mention another study, during which rather ambiguous conclusions were obtained: the overwhelming number of scientific publications slows down progress.