The document discusses emerging requirements for federally funded research to share data. A presidential directive from 2013 requires that taxpayer-funded research data be made available to the public. Several agencies are required to develop plans to implement open data policies. Researchers may need to create data management plans and share data in public repositories under licenses that provide access while protecting rights. Requirements vary between agencies and managing shared data requirements may impact researchers.

1. Overview of Emerging Requirements for Data
Management of Federally Funded Research
Richard Huffine
Leveraging Data to Lead: SLA Maryland Premier Event
November 5, 2015

2. Overview
• Recent History
• Presidential Directive
• Pending Legislation
• Data Management
• Open Data
• Public Access vs.
Public Domain
• Creative Commons
• Impact on Researchers
• Options for Sharing 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
• The National Institutes of Health established the first U.S. Public
Access policy in 2004. That policy included sharing data.

4. 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.

5. Presidential Directive
• Public access 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.

6. Pending 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
– 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
– Referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on
March 19, 2015.

7. Data Management
• All of the plans either require or encourage the creation and
adherence to Data Management Plans.
• 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.
• The DMPTool (https://dmptool.org/) is a free tool available 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

8. Data Management
• The data-management-planning process 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.

9. Open Data
• 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.

10. Public Access vs. 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.

11. 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

12. Impact on Researchers
• The impact of this emerging patchwork 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/
– Data Conservancy - https://dataconservancy.org

13. Options for Sharing 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/

14. Questions?
Richard Huffine (orcid.org/0000-0002-8974-2750)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardhuffine
richardhuffine@gmail.com