NSF's OSTP response released: "Today's Data, Tomorrow's Discoveries"

The community has been waiting with baited breath to see what NSF would do regarding the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's mandate for public access to results of federally funded research.  The memorandum from OSTP, "Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research", was issued in February 22. 2013 and directs Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research. 

The National Science Foundation has now issued a plan: "Today's Data, Tomorrow's Discoveries."   The requirement will apply to new awards resulting from proposals submitted or due, on or after the effective date of the Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide that will be issued in January 2016. 

Section 3.1 provides the following detail:

NSF will require that either the version of record or the final accepted peer-reviewed manuscript in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers in juried conference proceedings or transactions described in the scope above (Section 2.0) and resulting from new awards resulting from proposals submitted, or due, on or after the January 2016 effective date must: 

•  Be deposited in a public access compliant repository designated by NSF;

•  Be available for download, reading, and analysis free of charge no later than 12 months after initial publication;

•  Possess a minimum set of machine-readable metadata elements in a metadata record to be made available free of charge upon initial publication (Section 7.3.1); 

•  Be managed to ensure long-term preservation (Section 7.7); and 

•  Be reported in annual and final reports during the period of the award with a unique persistent identifier8 that provides links to the full text of the publication as well as other metadata elements. 

UK Libraries has been preparing for this since the OSTP memorandum was released and we are developing services and training to help our University of Kentucky researchers comply with this mandate.  Stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks!  

Article of the Week: On the importance of being negative

You may have missed this article from The Guardian on Sunday March 8, 2015.  I believe that more attention should be paid to the topic discussed - the fact that not all research is successful. Hypotheses are not always proven, experiments don't always work out, things fail.  In a climate where success and tenure depend on being published in the most prestigious journals we rarely hear about the research that doesn't pan out.  In my experience (just in life, mind you - I am no scientist!) one learns as much or more from failure as from success.

The article in The Guardian addresses this issue and is well worth reading.  You can find it here: On the importance of being negative  Happy reading!

Open Data as Open Educational Resources

I came across an interesting blog post by Marieke Guy on the Open Education Working Group blog that addresses the idea of using open data as a form of OER.  Open data is gaining rapid traction as essential to good research practice as funding agencies are demanding that research data be made available for verification, transparency, and reuse. This blog post addresses how using open research data can improve student learning, research and literacy skills.  This is an article that I will be bookmarking!

Read the post here:
The 21st Century’s Raw Material: Using Open Data as Open Educational Resources