c) | Public access plans should outline the policies that federal agencies will use to establish researcher responsibilities on how federally funded scientific data will be managed and shared, including: |
i) | Details describing any potential legal, privacy, ethical, technical, intellectual property, or security limitations,[1] and/or any other potential restrictions or limitations on data access, use, and disclosure, including those defined in terms and conditions of funding agreement or award or that convey from a data use agreement or stipulations of an Institutional Review Board; | |
ii) | Plans to maximize appropriate[2] sharing of the federally funded scientific data identified in Section 3(a) of this memorandum, such as providing risk-mitigated opportunities for limited data access;[3] and, | |
iii) | The specific online digital repository or repositories where the researcher expects to deposit their relevant data, consistent with the federal agency’s guidelines. |
d) | In consultation with OMB, federal agencies should allow researchers to include reasonable publication costs and costs associated with submission, curation, management of data, and special handling instructions as allowable expenses in all research budgets. |
e) | Federal agencies should report to OSTP, when requested, on the status of their public access plans and policy implementation, including the number of all scholarly publications funded by the federal agencies and any other relevant statistics collected by the agency. |
4. Ensuring Scientific and Research Integrity in Agency Public Access Policies
Public access policies that deliver transparent, open, secure, and free communication of federally funded research and activities in an expeditious manner are an important tool to uphold scientific[4] and research[5] integrity. Federal agencies should take steps to ensure that public access policies support scientific and research integrity by transparently communicating to the public critical information, including that which is related to the authorship, funding, affiliations, and development status of federally funded research. The public should be able to identify which federal agencies support given investments in science, the scientists who conduct that research, and the extent to which peer-review was conducted. These actions support the value that maintaining and restoring public trust in science requires openness, security, freedom, and integrity. Federal agencies should take actions to ensure that these elements of scientific and
- ↑ Including national security concerns.
- ↑ The term “appropriate” is used to signal that public access to federally funded research results and data should be maximized in a manner that protects confidentiality, privacy, business confidential information, and security, avoids negative impact on intellectual property rights, innovation, program and operational improvements, and U.S. competitiveness, and preserves the balance between the relative value of long-term preservation and access and the associated cost and administrative burden.
- ↑ For example, secure research data centers, data use agreements, perturbing identifiable information, or excluding sensitive variables.
- ↑ See the 2022 NSTC Report “Protecting the Integrity of Government Science”: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/01-22-Protecting_the_Integrity_of_Government_Science.pdf
- ↑ See the 2022 NSTC “Guidance for Implementing National Security Presidential Memorandum 33 (NSPM-33) on National Security Strategy for United States Government-Supported Research and Development” (NSPM-33 Implementation Guidance): https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/010422-NSPM-33-Implementation-Guidance.pdf
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