(11 Jan 2023) The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced new actions to advance open and equitable research, including new grant funding, improvements in research infrastructure, broadened research participation for emerging scholars, and expanded opportunities for public engagement. OSTP is also launching the Year of Open Science, featuring actions across the federal government throughout 2023 to advance national open science policy, provide access to the results of the nation’s taxpayer-supported research, accelerate discovery and innovation, promote public trust, and drive more equitable outcomes.
The Administration’s actions include:
- OSTP and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) today released an official definition of open science for use across the U.S. government: “The principle and practice of making research products and processes available to all, while respecting diverse cultures, maintaining security and privacy, and fostering collaborations, reproducibility, and equity.” A unified, official definition will galvanize federal efforts, promote interagency collaboration, and drive progress.
- Federal agencies will provide updates to their public access plans to OSTP and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) throughout 2023, in response to OSTP’s public access memorandum, Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research. Agencies with research and development expenditures of at least $100 million annually will submit their initial public access plan updates by February 21. Agencies with smaller research and development expenditures will have until August 20.
- CENDI, an interagency group of 10 federal agencies working to improve productivity of U.S. federal research and development efforts, in partnership with the National Science and Technology Council Subcommittee on Open Science, is today launching a new online resource for the public to learn about emerging open science initiatives, funding opportunities, and programs across the Federal government. CENDI also provides a search tool across federal agency public access repositories for federally funded research articles.
- The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Transform to Open Science (TOPS) program will launch NASA into the Year of Open Science this month. The TOPS program this year will feature new curricula in open science for students, researchers, and the public, as well as robust engagement with people and groups that have been historically underrepresented in science, conferences on open science throughout the year, and other new initiatives.
- The National Institutes of Health’s Final Policy on Data Management and Sharing will go into effect on January 25 for most competing funding applications and intramural research protocols. This policy expects researchers to develop a Data Management and Sharing Plan and to maximize appropriate sharing of scientific data. The policy conforms to OSTP’s public access memorandum.
- The Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information, in the Office of Science, will introduce a host of new advances and services to improve the open science capabilities of the DOE scientific library in 2023. The library also helps researchers to maintain scientific integrity across their research portfolios by providing and integrating persistent digital identifiers for DOE-funded researchers and their scientific results, including data, publications, and software.
- The U.S. Digital Corps, a program launched in 2021 by the Biden-Harris Administration and housed at the General Services Administration (GSA), will include open science as an impact area for its 2023 Fellows cohort. The U.S. Digital Corps is an early‑career technology opportunity for recent graduates, career changers, veterans, and others with expertise in software engineering, data science and analytics, product management, design, and cybersecurity, to work across the federal government.
- The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agricultural Library will continue to improve equity through the openness of its digital infrastructure by launching a new web page in February that helps researchers to share, and the public to find and access, USDA-funded research.
- The National Endowment for the Humanities has issued a notice of funding opportunity for the 2023 Digital Humanities Advancement Grants (DHAG) program. DHAG recipients contribute to humanities scholarship by serving carefully identified audiences, addressing issues of accessibility and usability, and designing equitable, open, replicable, and sustainable projects, including those that support the enhancement or design of digital infrastructure that contributes to and supports the humanities, such as open-source code, tools, or platforms. The application deadline is June 15.
- The National Science Foundation Directorate for Geosciences (GEO) announced a new funding opportunity, the Geosciences Open Science Ecosystem (GEO OSE) in alignment with the Federal Year of Open Science. The GEO OSE program seeks to support sustainable and networked open science activities to foster an ecosystem of inclusive access to data, physical collections, software, advanced computing, and other resources toward advancing research and education in the geosciences. The purpose of this support is to broadly enable geoscientists to leverage expanding information resources and computing capabilities to address interdisciplinary grand challenge research questions at the forefront of the geosciences.
- OSTP, in partnership with OMB and GSA, released the Fifth U.S. Open Government National Action Plan. This plan includes commitments from multiple departments, agencies, and offices to ensure, consistent with law, the public has access to federal government data, research, and information, and to empower citizens to participate in the work of government.
- OMB and federal statistical agencies released the new Standard Application Process (SAP) online portal, a new front door for researchers to find and request access to restricted, confidential data from over 1000 datasets from the federal statistical agencies for evidence building purposes. The SAP was collaboratively developed by leaders from across the federal statistical system, led by the Chief Statistician of the United States.
- The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is co-hosting an Open Hackathon—an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering using open data, software, and infrastructure—with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, from February 28 to March 2.
- The United States Geological Survey will hold a Community for Data Integration Workshop focused on the theme of Open Data for Open Science from May 2 to May 5, at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
The announcement in full is here.
