ORFG Submits Response to OSTP's Federal Public Access Policy RFI

Note: This public comment was submitted in conjunction with the OSTP’s request found here.

The Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) today submitted a formal response to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s “Request for Information: Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications, Data and Code Resulting From Federally Funded Research”. The comments, which may be found in their entirety here, encourage the federal government to adopt a system that enables better access to the entirety of the scientific process (including articles, data, and code) as a means to enable better science - better tested, debated, and understood.

The ORFG submission encourages the Federal Government to take two primary steps to make tax-payer funded research more accessible and reusable. First, Federally funded research should be made available more rapidly. The current policy effectively places a 12 month hold on the widest dissemination of tax-payer funded research. This is inconsistent with a rigorous, transparent research system. It limits the extent to which results can be reproduced and replicated, and allows for the possibility that incorrect findings can take root. Society is better off if scientific errors can be identified more quickly. Similarly, society also benefits if promising research findings can be validated and built upon expeditiously. The notion that tested, transparent science can be extended ties to the second step the Federal Government should consider. It is essential that the Government continues to invest in infrastructure to serve a range of research outputs - papers, data, code, and more. Technology such as machine learning and artificial intelligence have the potential to identify encouraging patterns and research avenues across a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary problem spaces. The Federal Government can serve a critical catalytic role in supporting tools, services, and repositories to not only store these research outputs, but to make them actionable.

The ORFG’s comments may be read in their entirety here.