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NASA Wants You To Pay To Read Research That You Already Paid For

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
NASAWatch
March 5, 2023
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NASA Wants You To Pay To Read Research That You Already Paid For
Nature Paywall
NASAWatch

Keith’s 8 March update: NASA PAO has contacted me to tell me that they have corrected this issue. Keith’s original note: NASA issued a press release on 1 March 2023 about newly published results from the DART mission. In that release they link to four papers in Nature magazine about DART mission results. Except when you go to the links that NASA posted you quickly find out that you can only read the abstracts of these papers – not the full paper that is behind Nature’s paywall (see the screen grab from Nature). You have to pay money out of your own pocket to read each of the papers. That’s odd. Repeated calls from the OSTPs in both the Obama and Biden Administrations were made to make access to government-funded research open and transparent for all taxpayers as soon as possible (see “OSTP Issues Guidance to Make Federally Funded Research Freely Available Without Delay” from 25 August 2022). More below.

Two of the papers were eventually posted online Sunday night on the arXiv preprint server and anyone, anywhere can read them in their entirety: Ejecta from the DART-produced active asteroid Dimorphos and Orbital Period Change of Dimorphos Due to the DART Kinetic Impact. The papers Momentum Transfer from the DART Mission Kinetic Impact on Asteroid Dimorphos and Successful Kinetic Impact into an Asteroid for Planetary Defense are not online as far as I can tell but maybe they will be

Two papers have been released albeit not by NASA or the government. As such, in keeping with the spirit and intent of government requirements, you’d think that Marc Etkind and Johnny Stephenson et al at NASA PAO would revise the links in their press release online and issue a revised version with links to all of the open access versions of these papers – and make certain that the remaining two unreleased papers make their way online. Let’s see if they do.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

2 responses to “NASA Wants You To Pay To Read Research That You Already Paid For”

  1. Cosmos_Mariner says:
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    Not sure about Nature and Science but other journals allow free public access only if authors pay additional cost. At NASA this now required for authors to do, I guess in fulfillment of the White House guidelines.

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