Comment from Sydney Shuster

[200.432, 200.454, 200.461, 200.206, 200.450] To Whom it May Concern: My name is Sydney. I am a PhD candidate in chemistry at Yale University. I research metabolism and how it changes during cancer, neurodegeneration, and metabolic syndrome. Before graduate school, I worked as a research scientist at the NIH trying to better understand Lou Gherig's disease and frontotemporal dementia. I am writing in my personal capacity to oppose the proposed revisions to sections 200.432, 200.454, 200.461, 200.206, and 200.450 that would restrict typical professional expenses, curtail the communication of scientific results, and impose excessive scrutiny on scientists' activities. Attending scientific conferences is critical to my research and career and I do not always know which conferences make sense to attend at the time of grant application. For example, I used NSF funding to attend a brand new conference focusing on the specialized technique I work with. The conference literally did not exist when I applied for grant funding years earlier. Attending the conference sparked new ideas for research direction in neurodegeneration and my talk there lead to a job offer. I also was able to provide guidance to other instrument users who I never otherwise would have met. Attending this conference, which occured in Europe, would not have been possible without my NSF funding. In my short time as a scientist, I have worked on nine peer reviewed manuscripts. I plan to submit my tenth within the month. These papers have been cited hundreds of times and are how I share results. Publications are the record of science being done. Being able to publish and read other published work is literally the backbone of research. Section 200.461 muzzles researchers who do not have private or personal funds to pay for publication. Most journals, especially the most trusted ones, are moving toward an open access model, which I fully support as it makes it so all can read research articles first hand. But by not allowing open access fees to be paid by grants these papers will simply not be published or will be relegated to preprints without peer review. This makes science inaccessible for all but the most funded. It feels like these rule changes aim to make science less accessible and harder to communicate. With less communication comes less progress. Collaborative science moves us forward. Please reject this rules change.