Statement on Expanded Public Access to Data

Use the link to access the full text statement excerpted as follows: "The February 22, 2013, White House Memorandum on 'Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,' provides new opportunities for partnership between research institutions and Federal agencies. Enhanced access to digital data accelerates the pace of scientific discovery, facilitates independent confirmation of scientific results, promotes innovation, and supports education. Open data policies must also be harmonized with existing policies such as those protecting the privacy of research subjects.

Today, practices and the infrastructure for the curation, description, storage and preservation of digital data are considerably less developed in some disciplines than they are for peer-reviewed journal articles. It will be important that whatever policy or policies federal agencies propose minimizes the cost and complexity to avoid increasing the administrative overhead of compliance with grant requirements for both principal investigators and research administration.Since resources must be found within existing agency budgets to implement plans, the value of full data preservation and assured ease of access must be balanced against the costs involved, as foreseen in the first sentence of Section 4 of the Memorandum ... We suggest that a taskforce be empanelled to give operational meaning to this definition and to address the challenges and resolve the issues OSTP enumerated in subheadings a to j of point 4 

of the directive. The membership of the taskforce should include representatives from research universities, scholarly societies and federal funding agencies ..."