Public Access to Scientific Data and Publications

Abstract:

NASA has developed a plan for complying with the OSTP requirement on public access to the results of scientific research – including both data and publications. NASA is establishing a single archive for public access to peer-reviewed publications following an appropriate embargo period. NASA has made a great effort to have data from its spacecraft openly available for many years. What is new is that now NASA will require scientists to submit -- at the time the research is proposed – a “data management plan”. This plan will be evaluated along with the proposal during the review process. It is expected that the data used in peer-reviewed publications will be archived in a persistent format. Managing data for long-term storage will be a challenge as data volumes grow, formats and media evolve, and people are increasingly mobile. While we now have the capacity to store (cheaply) every bit of data we produce, that is certainly not the right strategy. In this talk, we will give a brief overview of how NASA interprets data publishing.