ARL Responds to US Office of Science and Technology Policy Request for Information on American Research Environment - Association of Research Libraries

"ARL endorses the recommendations in the 2018 National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) consensus report Open Science by Design: Realizing a Vision for 21st Century Research. The report, grounded in FAIR principles, promotes essential actions for research ecosystem stakeholders to improve openness and transparency in research processes, and share and reuse research products, in order to accelerate scientific discovery and innovation. In particular, research funders and research institutions are in the best position to develop policies and procedures to identify the data, code, specimens, and other research products that ensure long-term public availability, and they are best positioned to provide the resources necessary for the long-term preservation and stewardship of those research products.1 Successful implementation of policies to identify research outputs for reuse and long-term preservation will require integration and alignment between the scientific community (e.g., managers of domain repositories and scholarly societies) and the stewardship community. ARL is committed to partnering with and convening the relevant stakeholders to work towards this alignment.... ARL recommends that federal agencies provide maintenance funding and require maintenance plans for community-governed tools and services that enable rapid dissemination, interlinking research through registries of persistent identifiers, data sharing, and collaboration to advance scientific progress. New modes of research publication enable researchers to publish executable code and data alongside articles, share preprints with associated data and code, enable post-publication peer review through overlay journals, and facilitate collaboration and team science. Scientific tools and infrastructure such as outlined above, including tools like Jupyter Notebooks, ReproZip, and Code Ocean, accelerate the progress of science and facilitate replicability. Openness enables both interoperability and preservation for future research and the scholarly record. A recent paper on the arXiv.org preprint server, “Publishing Computational Research—A Review of Infrastructures for Reproducible and Transparent Scholarly Communication,” provides an excellent review of the issues from major stakeholder perspectives...."