John C. Wingfield: Preparing for the Best and the Worst of Times

"John C. Wingfield, an environmental endocrinologist at the University of California, Davis, was appointed by National Science Foundation (NSF) director Subra Suresh as head of the foundation's Directorate for Biological Sciences, known universally as BIO, last September. BioScience editor in chief Timothy M. Beardsley interviewed Wingfield in his office at NSF headquarters in Arlington, Virginia....Beardsley: Will there be mandates on open access to data? Wingfield: Yes. I can't give you any details, because I don't know them yet, and they are evolving, but somehow NSF is going to have them. As you know, we have now a two-page data management plan, which needs to go in with each proposal. That's really a beginning. It's going to evolve tremendously as we gain more experience and as principal investigators tell us how they'd like to see the data managed...."