Who We Are | NIST

"In 2014, we published our “Plan for Providing Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research” and relevant directives, but we needed infrastructure to execute the plan and allow staff to comply with our policy.  

Initial work of the Special Programs Office, the Office of Data and Informatics in the Materials Measurement Laboratory, the Office of Information Systems Management, and the Information Services Office focused on providing systems to address the immediate requirements of OMB and OSTP, i.e., provide an inventory of our research data assets. We provide access to research data through a system we named MIDAS. MIDAS can be used to generate data management plans, collect records for our enterprise data inventory (EDI), and send information about those records to data.gov and data.nist.gov.  MIDAS is also used to inventory our open-source code. Using an application programming interface (API) to an external provider, MIDAS is able to assign digital object identifiers (DOIs) to NIST datasets and code. MIDAS can also generate a README file.  Data can be stored independently or uploaded through MIDAS and securely stored in our Public Data Repository (PDR). The PDR automatically creates landing pages that are returned through the ‘search’ feature of our data portal. The data ‘author’ can edit the landing page while seeing the same view that the public will see. The PDR also generates a citation that data users can reference in their papers, and provides metrics for the number of times the data was downloaded and the number of unique users. "