What's Next?
SHARE Engages with US Federal Agencies
This month has seen the release of the first federal agency public access plan in response to
the 2013 White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) directive. As you likely know, this policy memorandum directed federal agencies with more than $100 million in R&D expenditures to (1) develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication; and (2) require researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research.
More information on the plans that have been unveiled may be found on the ARL website.
The
US Department of Energy (DOE) plan is an important marker in the push for greater openness. While the DOE plan does not promote immediate access and full reuse, it puts into action the principle that federally funded research should be made more readily available to researchers, taxpayers, and other interested parties.
Although SHARE is not explicitly a response to the OSTP directive, high-profile initiatives such as this directive have created a new and timely opportunity for the higher education community to better structure its strategies and systems for managing both data and publications. Independent of how federal agencies choose to operationalize implementation of the OSTP directive, the higher education community is uniquely positioned to play a leading role in the good stewardship of research.
SHARE aims to work with federal agencies and other funders to enable the inventory, preservation, accessibility, and reuse of research outputs. To that end, we are pleased to be collaborating with the Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information on the SHARE Notification Service prototype. We look forward to engaging other federal agencies as we move into beta.
