Earlier this month, NASA announced PubSpace, a part of U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine’s (NIH) PubMed Central (PMC), to give the public a free and open access to all the peer-reviewed papers from the researches that are funded by NASA.
This open access to all the papers within one year of publication excludes any researches involving personal patents, papers that are protected by privacy and proprietary laws, and the researches involving national security.
With more than 800 peer-reviewed papers, this effort from NASA has once again proven how a public organization should be transparent and open to the public. At the same time, it is also worth mentioning that the repository includes only papers that are published in the current decade—mostly since 2013—and as mentioned by NASA, all papers of researches that are funded since 2016.
If more institutes could open up access to their researches and papers, perhaps there won’t be a need for sites like sci-hub, which rather takes a different approach on enabling free knowledge to the public.
