[1]On August 4, 2014, the Department of Energy (DOE) launched the DOE Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science^Beta (DOE PAGES^Beta) [2], a portal and search engine that makes scholarly scientific publications resulting from DOE research funding publicly accessible and searchable at no charge to users.

DOE PAGES^Beta was developed and is maintained by the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in response to a February 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum that called on federal agencies to develop and implement plans to provide public access to the results of research they fund within a year of publication.

When fully operational, DOE PAGES^Beta will offer free public access to the best available version of DOE-affiliated scholarly publications – either the peer-reviewed, accepted manuscript or the published scientific journal article – after an administrative interval of 12 months.  When a publisher provides a publicly-accessible article about DOE R&D results, DOE PAGES^Beta will link to that article; if the article is not available, DOE PAGES^Beta will provide access to the corresponding accepted manuscript.

As a key step in implementing DOE PAGES^Beta, DOE is building off its existing scientific and technical information (STI) reporting practices to require the submission of peer-reviewed accepted manuscripts for DOE-funded researchers starting October 1, 2014.

For publications emanating from DOE National Laboratories, DOE will officially require public access to any scholarly publication published on or after October 1, 2014, with public access enabled within 12 months from publication date.  That means that DOE-funded Lab-affiliated authors will be expected to submit accepted manuscript metadata and links (or the full text of the manuscript itself) to OSTI from October 1, 2014, onward.

Likewise, for DOE financial assistance recipients (grantees) at universities and other institutions, the public access requirement will apply to any award made or renewed after October 1, 2014.

DOE PAGES^Beta leverages the long-established DOE Scientific and Technical Information Program [3] infrastructure and corporate E-Link [4] submission system for collecting, preserving, and disseminating STI to encompass accepted manuscripts.  DOE-funded authors at national laboratories and grantee and other research institutions will use this existing infrastructure to submit metadata and links to accepted manuscripts (or the full text itself) to OSTI.

When launched in August 2014, DOE PAGES^Beta contained an initial collection of accepted manuscripts and journal articles as a demonstration of its functionality and eventual expanded content.  Over the next year, additional metadata and links to articles and accepted manuscripts will be added as they are submitted to OSTI, with anticipated annual growth of 20,000-30,000 publicly-accessible articles and manuscripts in the years ahead.

Feedback about DOE PAGES^Beta is welcomed and may be provided to pagesfeedback@osti.gov [5].