The U.S. National Science Foundation has posted a policy notice, NSF PAPPG 24-1 Supplement 2, that applies to all financial assistance awards issued on or after January 22, 2026.
The following sections of the PAPPG are revised to align with NSF's Gold Standard Science implementation plan:
Changes to the NSF Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR)
- Removing the 12-month publication embargo from all Portable Document Format (PDF) product types
- Enabling input of Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) and Version of Record (VoR)
- Making machine-readable versions of publications in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format available for download
- Enabling PAR Identifiers (IDs) to behave as Persistent Identifiers (PID), similar to the Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)
Changes to Research.gov Project Reports
- Auto-populating PAR IDs as Persistent ID links from NSF-PAR into Project Reports for journal articles, conference papers, datasets, and workshop reports
- Auto-populating Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) and Version of Record (VOR) metadata from NSF-PAR into Project Reports for journal articles, conference papers, and workshop reports
- Prohibiting direct dataset entry into project reports within Research.gov
Changes to the Data Management and Sharing Plan (DMSP)
These revisions reinforce timely data sharing in accordance with federal public access policies.
- DMSPs must eventually be created using the new Research.gov tool (expected release is April 27, 2026).
- All data supporting NSF-funded publications must be shared at time of publication, unless justified in the DMSP.
If you have questions about how this update may affect your NSF award(s) please contact your Contract Administrator.