NASA template

Last week NASA launched a new Research Portal, with consolidated information regarding data management plans and publications. There are no changes to the DMP requirements as the public access plan remains the same. The big news concerns the creation of PubSpace, an open access article repository that is part of the NIH-managed PubMed Central. Beginning with 2016 awards, all NASA-funded authors and co-authors will be required to deposit copies of their peer-reviewed scientific publications and associated data into PubSpace.

Another new resource is the NASA Data Portal, which bears the following description:

“The NASA data catalog serves not as a repository of study data, but as a registry that has information describing the dataset (i.e., metadata) and information about where and how to access the data. The public has access to the catalog and associated data free of charge. NASA will continue to identify additional approaches involving public and private sector entities and will continue efforts to improve public access to research data. NASA will explore the development of a research data commons—a federated system of research databases—along with other departments and agencies for the storage, discoverability, and reuse of data, with a particular focus on making the data underlying the conclusions of federally funded peer-reviewed scientific research publications available for free at the time of publication.”

In response to the announcement, we’ve updated a few guidance links for the NASA template and reached out to the NASA Open Innovation Team—part of the office of the CIO— which appears to be in charge of these new initiatives.

Review workflow: Refinements and fixes

After releasing the review workflow enhancements, we encountered a bug that prevented the system from sending out an email notification if an institution did not create a customized message. Only one user was affected and we have since fixed the issue. We also added a grayed-out default message to the box on the Institution Profile page. We apologize if any emails went awry and invite you to test again and let us know if things are working as expected. You can also check out the updated documentation on the GitHub wiki.