Presentation as part of the Geological Society of America 2015 Annual Conference, Technical Session 95: Evolution of the Data Life Cycle.

1. Overview of Emerging Requirements for
Data Management of Federally Funded
Research in the Geosciences
Evolution of the Data Life Cycle
(Geoscience Information Society)
Technical Session 95
Richard Huffine
Geological Society of America
2015 Annual Conference
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
November 3, 2015

2. Overview
• Recent History
• Presidential Directive
• Legislation
• Data Management
• Open Data and Public Access
• Public Domain
• Creative Commons
• Impact on Geoscience
Researchers
• Options for Sharing Your Data
• Questions?
• Contact Information

3. Recent History
• Federal agencies fund research in a variety of ways:
– Grant solicitations
– Partnership Agreements
– Student internships
– Contracts with universities
– Contracts with companies
• The products of those activities have rarely been claimed to be the
property of the government
– New requirements do not change the ownership of scholarship and date
• It does, however, require that the results of research be made
publicly available

4. Recent History
• Public availability means:
– Free to read
– Defined rights for re-use, reproduction, acknowledgement
• In addition to new federal requirements, many other funders or
partners are establishing expectations for transparency, access, and
utility of research and the data used to produce it
– College and University policies
– Grantmaking Foundations
– Publishers
– Societies and Associations
• Even some research disciplines are beginning to coalesce around
standards of practice for data availability and use.

5. Presidential Directive
• On February 22, 2013, the White House issued a directive, requiring
that the results of taxpayer-funded research – both articles and data
– be made freely available to the general public. The goal of the
directive was to accelerate scientific discovery and fuel innovation.
• U.S. Government agencies with annual research and development
expenditures over $100 million are required to develop a plan for
accomplishing the goals of the directive.
• Agencies covered by the directive had until August 22, 2013 to
develop a plan for implementation. As of now, 24 Agencies have
self-identified as meeting the requirements of the Directive and 15 of
them have released at least draft plans.

6. Presidential Directive
• Agencies that fund geoscience research:
– Department of Agriculture
– Department of Defense
– Department of Energy
– Department of Interior* ^
– Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)*
– National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
– National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
– National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
– National Science Foundation (NSF)
– Smithsonian Institution
*- these agencies have yet to release their plans.
^ - While the Department of Interior has not
released a plan, the USGS released an updated
Instructional Memo on Scientific Data
Management in February 2015. That policy does
not explicitly address federally-funded research
that may include external partners.
(see:
http://www.sparc.arl.org/advocacy/national/directive
)

7. Legislation
• Currently Pending:
– H.R.1426 - Public Access to Public Science Act, Referred to the Subcommittee
on Research and Technology on August 18, 2015
– S.779 - Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act of 2015,
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Ordered to be
reported with an amendment in the nature of a substitute favorably on July 29,
2015
– H.R.1477 - Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act of 2015,
Referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on
March 19, 2015.
• Prior efforts:
– 2005 - 2013 - Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)- there were
versions of the bill in the 109th, 111th, and 112th Congresses
– 2011 - 2013 - Research Works Act (RWA) introduced and died in the 112th
Congress

8. Data Management
• All of the plans either require or encourage the creation and adherence
to Data Management Plans.
• These Plans may be required submissions as part of a grant request or
may be incorporated into the partnership agreement between federal
agencies and external partners in the future.
• The DMPTool (https://dmptool.org/) is a free tool available to researcher
to:
– Draft data management plans that comply with the requirements of specific funding
agencies
– Provides easy to follow instructions for building a data management plan
– Informs users of resources and services available to help follow the plan that you draft
• Data management is required at the beginning of a research effort but it
should be reviewed, revised, and followed throughout the life of a project

9. Data Management
• The data-management-planning process not only ensures access to
data that supports published research, it also ensures that research
data is documented, deposited, and made available for other
researchers.
• Each agency plan addresses different aspects of the challenge of
making research data available. NASA is planning to “explore the
development of a research data commons, a federated system of
research databases.”
• The U.S. Department of Energy is planning to provide digital object
identifiers (DOIs) to datasets resulting from its funded research in
order to improve the discoverability and future citation of datasets.

10. Open Data and Public Access
• This effort is part of the Administration’s Open Government Initiative
and it places an emphasis on data availability and reuse as well as
the ability for people to reproduce the results of research.
• The various agency-specific plans that have been released also
require the release of data sets upon publication of articles or as
part of the completion of a project.
• The approach to releasing data is rarely prescribed and varies from:
– encouraging the use of “approved external repositories,”
– prescription to use existing data centers,
– use of an “interoperable data infrastructure,” or
– no specific requirement, just to use a public repository.
• The plans speak of developing “Enterprise Data Inventories” or
creating data catalogs or locator services for the public to find data
based on the source of funding.

11. Open Data and Public Access
• Some of the plans for data mirror the requirements for publications.
That would allow for up to a 12-month embargo of the material from
the date of publication. Others require that data be made available
at the time of publication.
• The plans are not aligned across organizations. Some focus only on
data that supports a publication. Others distinguish between short-
term data access and long-term data preservation.
• There is a crowd-sourced compilation of elements from all of the
publicly released plans at:
– https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PYOhBh6bglh6BkQFlpvNLOwlpzvQyguWAG8

12. Public Domain
• It is important to note that in the United States, data cannot be
copyrighted. The control or protection of rights for an aggregation of
data is also limited.
• The copyright and control of data, datasets, and databases is very
different in other parts of the world.
• Creators can however license data, data sets or databases.
Releasing research data under a license is one approach that could
potentially meet both the funders requirements and the interests of
their research partners.
See: Miller, Arthur R. "Copyright Protection for Computer Programs, Databases, and
Computer-Generated Works: Is Anything New Since CONTU?." Harvard Law Review (1993): 977-1073.
Ginsburg, Jane C. "Copyright, common law, and sui generis protection of databases in the United States
and abroad.” University of Cincinnati Law Review. 66 (1997): 151.

13. Creative Commons
• Many producers grant narrow permissions to use data via a “terms
of service” agreement. A lot of data sharing also occurs among
researchers in an ad hoc manner.
• Copyright and similar restrictions may otherwise limit dissemination
or reuse of data but data sharing can be facilitated by distribution
under standard, public legal tools used to manage those terms.
• Creative Commons licenses and the CC0 (C-C-zero) public domain
dedication can facilitate data sharing while maintaining specific
permissions for the use of the data.
See: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Data

14. Impact on Geoscience Researchers
• The impact of his emerging network of requirements is difficult to
determine today. One thing is certain, if you work with multiple
agencies, you will need to navigate conflicting guidance and
reporting requirements.
• Many institutions (large research Universities, Federal laboratories,
consortia, etc.) are working to get in front of the curve and develop
standard practices that exceed any specific requirement.
• There are a number of federal research initiatives that are
partnering with funders and recipients to ensure that the
requirements don’t add too much of a burden to the work of
researchers:
– DataOne - https://www.dataone.org/
– Earth Cube - https://www.nsf.gov/geo/earthcube/
– Data Conservancy - https://dataconservancy.org

15. Options for Sharing Your Data
• NIH Data Sharing Repositories – 69 different providers listed
– https://www.nlm.nih.gov/NIHbmic/nih_data_sharing_repositories.html
• Dryad Digital Repository
– prices start at $75/submission for a non-member and go down based on volume
and affiliation.
– http://datadryad.org/

16. Questions?

17. Contact Information
Richard Huffine (orcid.org/0000-0002-8974-2750)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardhuffine
richardhuffine@gmail.com