Updated December 13, 2022

NIST-Funded External Research

Institutions receiving NIST funds ("awardees") for the conduct of scientific research must 

meet the public access requirements for scientific research data and publications 

described in the Terms and Conditions and Specific Award Conditions of their funding 

agreements. (Funding recipients can access NIST's Policy and Order for Managing Public 

Access to Results of Federally Funded Research at https://www.nist.gov/open.) NIST 

Federal Program Officers (FPOs) associated with the funding agreements must meet 

requirements described in NIST directives and the Department of Commerce Grants and 

Cooperative Agreements Manual, links to which are provided below. This page 

summarizes steps that must be taken to make the data and publications resulting 

from NIST-funded external research publicly available.

What must the awardee do?

1. Provide a data management plan (DMP) as part of the application for funding. Briefly, 

the DMP must include:

• a summary of activities that generate data

• a summary of the types of data generated by the identified activities

• a plan for storage and maintenance of the data generated by the identified 

activities, and

• a plan describing whether and how data generated by the identified activities will 

be reviewed and made available to the public.

2. Update the DMP as necessary over the course of the project and provide any revised 

DMPs to the FPO as part of regularly submitted Research Performance Progress Reports 

(RPPRs).

3. Deposit research data* in an appropriate repository as described in the DMP. This 

might be a domain-specific repository or a repository associated with a publisher, a 

university library, another funding agency, etc. (See guidance provided by the Office of 

Science and Technology Policy and examples provided by USGS.) Costs associated with 

making data public may have been included in the budget that was submitted with the 

proposal.

4. In the RPPR or after the conclusion of the award period, inform the FPO of the location 

at which research data* generated by the project is being maintained, preserved, and 

made freely available to the public. Include the digital object identifier (DOI) if one was 

assigned. 
Updated December 13, 2022

5. In the RPPR or after conclusion of the award period, send the FPO a copy of any peerreviewed publications that resulted from the work and tell them which option (below) will 

be used to make the papers freely available to the public within 12 months of 

publication. (The recipient is responsible for publication costs, which may have been 

included in the budget that was submitted with the proposal.)

• If papers are either (1) published in a journal whose publisher is a member of 

CHORUS or (2) placed in a repository comparable to NIH's PubMed Central (PMC) 

that meets another funder's requirements (e.g., NSF-PAR, DOE Pages, CDC Stacks), 

the papers do not also need to be deposited in PMC.

• If papers do not meet (1) or (2) above, they must be deposited in PMC. The funding 

recipient must send the author's version of the manuscript to the FPO. After the 

paper is deposited in PMC, the funding recipient must acknowledge that the paper 

is his/hers and review galleys as requested by NIHMS, the National Institutes of 

Health's manuscript submission system.

What must the FPO at NIST do?

1. Prior to awarding funds, review the DMP. Guidance is available. (Note that a template, 

example, and rubric are available to the awardee on the external NIST website.)

2. When an awardee reports via the Research Performance Progress Reports (RPPR) that 

data has been deposited in a repository, create a record in MIDAS, NIST's Enterprise Data 

Inventory (EDI), for the recipient's data.

• Under tab number 2, provide the DOI for the awardee's data (if they have one) in 

reply to "Do you already have a unique identifier?" If they don't have a DOI, 

encourage them to get one; enter it if it becomes available. A new DOI should not 

be assigned by NIST. Check the box saying that you do not want one.

• Under tab number 9, "Additional," type "Funding" followed by the agreement 

number (which typically begins with "60NANB" if it is a grant or "70NANB" if it is a 

cooperative agreement.)

Information contained in the EDI record will not be made public via data.gov nor will it be 

retrievable through NIST's data portal. The information is used solely for internal record 

keeping and for reporting metrics.

3. If peer-reviewed publications resulting from the funding agreement are not available 

through a publisher-member of CHORUS or through another agency's repository, the FPO 

must deposit the author's version in PMC. Deposit of data associated with the publication 
Updated December 13, 2022

remains the responsibility of the funding recipient unless NIST chooses to maintain it 

through MIDAS as described in the preceding paragraph.

4. If the funding agreement and the data meet requirements described in the guidance for 

making non-NIST data available to the public, the FPO, with concurrence of his/her 

management chain, may choose to upload the recipient's data to the NIST repository 

associated with MIDAS. Information about the availability of the data will be sent 

to data.gov, and the data will be available on the NIST website through the data 

portal. Note that a NIST Point of Contact who will be responsible for fielding or redirecting questions about the data must be assigned in the event that the funding 

recipient becomes unavailable. 

5. If the grant or cooperative agreement results in a report to NIST rather than a peerreviewed publication, the FPO and his/her Division Chief may choose to have the report 

published as a Grant/Contractor Report (GCR), a type of NIST Technical Series 

publication.

*Research Data: Research data means the recorded factual material commonly accepted 

in the scientific community as necessary to validate research findings, but not any of the 

following: preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific papers, plans for future research, peer 

reviews, or communications with colleagues. This “recorded” material excludes physical 

objects (e.g., laboratory samples). Research data also does not include:

(i) Trade secrets, commercial information, materials necessary to be held confidential by 

a researcher until they are published, or similar information which is protected under law; 

and

(ii) Personnel and medical information and similar information the disclosure of which 

would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, such as information 

that could be used to identify a particular person in a research study. (2 C.F.R. §200.315 

(e)(3))

(Note: NIST considers the contents of laboratory notebooks to be preliminary analyses.)