The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy put out a request for information soliciting public input on long term preservation of and public access to the results of federally funded research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications.
The RFIs are parts of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 that calls on OSTP to coordinate with agencies and develop policies that assure widespread public access to the results of federally funded research.
The current RFIs take that process another step, seeking further guidance on access to scientific publications and initiating a parallel process relating to digital data, as called for in the COMPETES Act, wrote Phil Larson on the White House blog.
“OSTP has established two interagency policy groups under the National Science and Technology Council—the Task Force on Public Access to Scholarly Publications and the Interagency Working Group on Digital Data—to identify the specific objectives and public interests that need to be addressed by any policies in these two areas,” Larson wrote. “The groups will take into account the varying missions, types of data, and dissemination models associated with the range of Federal science agencies and scientific disciplines, and will help OSTP address other public access requirements of COMPETES—keeping in mind the need to follow statutory requirements and best practices for protecting personal privacy, proprietary interests, intellectual property rights, and author attribution.”
