NASA has placed online hundreds of scholarly, peer-reviewed articles on research projects it's funded since the late 1950s the public can access for free.

NASA's treasure trove of scientific articles can be accessed through NASA PubSpace, NASA's publication repository. NASA PubSpace is part of PubMed Central (PMC), a full-text, online archive of journal literature operated by the National Library of Medicine under the National Institutes of Health.

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NASA is using PMC to permanently preserve and provide easy public access to the peer-reviewed papers resulting from NASA-funded research.

NASA PubSpace can be accessed here. People can now search NASA related articles archived in PMC at NASA PubSpace.

Beginning with research funded in 2016, all NASA-funded authors and co-authors (both civil servant and non-civil servant) will be required to deposit copies of their peer-reviewed scientific publications and associated data into NASA PubSpace.

This excludes patents, publications that contain material governed by personal privacy, export control, proprietary restrictions or national security law or regulations.

This is the latest in several NASA initiatives to increase public access to the agency. NASA's website has an "Open Government" section that outlines initiatives to make the agency more available to the public through programs that promote machine-readability of NASA documents, open-source software development, and financial data transparency.

NASA's more transparent policy stems from a 2013 request from the Obama administration to increase public access to the results of all federally funded research. The request applied to all science-funding agencies funded by the US government.

"Making our research data easier to access will greatly magnify the impact of our research," said NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan. "As scientists and engineers, we work by building upon a foundation laid by others."

By releasing the data, scientists outside NASA can access all sorts of knowledge upon which to base their own work. In turn, their discoveries might provide new discoveries others can build on. NASA PubSpace is part of a greater trend of openness and accessibility in the scientific community.

TagsNASA, NASA PubSpace, PubMed Central, PMC