The National Security Agency (NSA) announced the starts of the 4th Annual Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition, the agency said Friday.

The competition focuses on recent work that “made outstanding contribution to cybersecurity science,” the NSA said in the announcement. To qualify, papers must have been published in peer-reviewed journals, magazines, or technical conferences between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31 2015.

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The competition was first established in 2012 to promote scientific research in cybersecurity through identifying and highlighting excellence in the field.

“Working with this annual competition is one of the highlights of my job. The emergence of a science supporting security can be seen in the high quality of the papers that are nominated for our award. And this progress couldn’t be timelier,” Deborah Frincke, NSA Director of Research, said in a statement.

“Securing our infrastructure gets harder, and will take the continued focus of government, industry, and academia: all of us, working together, to make progress,” she added.

Nominations will be reviewed by a panel of experts consisting of Dr. Whitfield Diffie, an independent cybersecurity advisor; Dr. Dan Geer of In-Q-Tel; Dr. John McLean from the Naval Research Laboratory; Professor Angela Sasse, University College London; Professor Fred Schneider, Cornell University; Phillip Venables of Goldman Sachs [GS]; Professor David Wagner, University of California at Berkeley; and Dr. Jeannette Wing of Microsoft Research [MSFT].

The panel is to provide individual recommendations to the NSA Research Directorate where Frincke will made the final decision on all awards.

The nominated works may be evaluated based on considerations of scientific merit, significance of the work reported, and the degree to which the paper exemplifies how to perform and report scientific research in cybersecurity, the competition website said.