Biophysical Society Bulletin | June 2024

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Salary Increases Announced for Postdocs and Graduate Students at NIH On April 23, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that early-career scientist recipients of the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards will receive a pay boost of $4,500 over their current salary level, or at least $61,008 per year. Graduate students will receive a $1,000 raise, bringing their minimum salary to $28,224. NIH also announced a $500 increase in childcare subsidies for early-career researchers who are parents. While these increases fall below the recommen dations of an NIH Advisory Group in December 2023, NIH has acknowledged the shortfall while citing the current, constrained budget environment as a factor.

Congress Requests Cost Analysis on Public Access Mandate When Congress passed the first of the two funding packages for fiscal year 2024 (FY24) on March 9, it included a provision calling for a financial report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) regarding its public access mandate. Specifically, the provision allows OSTP 100 days from the date of enactment to provide an analysis of the policy's anticipated impact on federal research investments, research integrity, and the peer review process, or else imple mentation of the memo will be paused until the report is sub mitted. The request seeks additional information relating to the August 2022 memo by then-Acting Administrator Alondra Nelson directing all federal agencies with research and devel opment expenditures of more than $100 million to develop policies to require that all publications resulting from funded research be made available to the public, free of charge, at the time of publication. Lawmakers have objected to the OSTP directed mandate since its release, with the House Appropriations Committee going so far as to attempt to prohibit implementation out right. The request for a comprehensive cost analysis was the compromise reached for enactment of the FY24 budget. The concerns raised by Congress are that moving toward a pay-to-publish model could disadvantage researchers from less-well-funded institutions and that the public access requirement could undermine researcher autonomy. Barring

any additional actions by Congress following the receipt of the financial report, all federal agencies that fund research are expected to publish public access plans that align with the Nelson memo by the end of this year and to implement them by the end of 2025. NSF Examines Research Security Protocols When the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile debuts next year, the NSF hopes to have new protocols in place to protect classified information from being disclosed without disrupting the basic research being funded by the agency. While NSF considered following the example of the Depart ment of Energy (DOE) to manage sensitive areas of research at the national laboratories, JASON—an independent group of scientists who advise the government—reviewed the breadth of research being conducted and issued an advisory report. The JASON report suggested that following a DOE model would be counterproductive for an agency that doesn’t fund classified research. Designating entire areas for special handling would reduce the number of scientists and institutions able to carry out the work, would increase costs, and also could slow progress in fields vital to the US economy. Instead, JASON has recom mended that NSF assess risk on a project-by-project basis

June 2024

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