A Digital Library Guru Discusses New Rules on Sharing Scientific Data

"Last week, a significant change went into effect at the National Science Foundation: The agency will now require researchers to submit data-management plans with their grant proposals. Open government advocates hailed the move as the latest in a series of steps that are expanding public access to work done with taxpayer money. The policy will not go so far as to mandate public sharing of all data, which in this context could mean anything from glacier images to scientific papers to computer code. But it will “require people to essentially justify why they choose not to be open,” says Beth Noveck, a professor at New York Law School who until recently directed the White House Open Government Initiative....We sat down with a leading data guru, Sayeed Choudhury, to get his take on what the move means for science. Mr. Choudhury, associate dean of university libraries at Johns Hopkins University, heads a project called the Data Conservancy. That effort has an NSF grant to help develop part of the foundation’s ambitious DataNet project, which seeks to build an international, large-scale data-curation network...."