ORFG's Response to OSTP's Federal Scientific Integrity RFI
Note: This public comment was submitted in conjunction with the OSTP’s request found here.
The Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) is pleased to submit a formal response to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s “Request for Information To Improve Federal Scientific Integrity Policies”. The comments, which may be found in their entirety here, encourage the federal government to prioritize making as much of the research lifecycle openly available to access and reuse. This includes, but is not limited to, preregistrations, protocols, preprints, articles, data, code, and software. The rationale is simple. Research cannot be considered reliable unless it can be tested, replicated, and built upon. Making critical components of the research lifecycle unavailable hampers OSTP’s pursuit of scientific integrity at best, and renders it impossible at worst. Limiting access to research outputs has the further effect of rendering science opaque, which negatively impacts public trust in the research endeavor writ large.
The ORFG encourages the Federal government to take the following actions to improve research integrity and enhance public trust in science:
Commit Federal funding to the development and maintenance of community-led, open source infrastructure, including but not limited to article, code, and data sharing repositories.
Support the development and implementation of a national-level policy that requires outputs (articles, code, data, preprints, protocols, etc.) from all Federally-funded research to be openly shared as soon as possible and in a format that enables both human and machine readability.
Incentivize open science practices by including supportive signaling language on research output sharing in all Federal calls for applications, grant evaluation guidelines, and grant reporting systems.
Encourage the development and implementation of standards for research outputs sharing, including but not limited to the use of persistent identifiers, trusted repositories, structured metadata, and non-proprietary file formats.
Provide training opportunities for both grantees and grant reviewers on open science practices, for example, on how to develop or evaluate a Data Management Plan that includes data sharing.
Read the ORFG’s response in its entirety here.