ORFG Responds to OSTP's Scientific Integrity Policy Framework RFI
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 Support the Development of a Federal Scientific Integrity Policy Framework”. This is a natural extension of our response to the OSTP’s previous RFI, outlining the reasons we believe open and transparent research practices are crucial for improving research integrity. Our current response outlines how open science can be integrated into research integrity policies, what specific provisions should be included in these policies, and how they should be evaluated. In particular, the ORFG encourages the federal government to take the following actions:
Support the development and implementation of a national-level policy on open science.
Require federal agencies to embed open and transparent practices into their research integrity policies, including requiring outputs (articles, code, data, preprints, protocols, tangible materials, 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.
Look to community-developed principles on research sharing and responsible metrics – including FAIR, CARE, the Hong Kong Principles, DORA, and the Leiden Manifesto – to guide these efforts and develop policy provisions and assessment criteria.
Stimulate best practices through research integrity policies by requiring sharing of all research outputs using persistent identifiers, trusted public repositories, detailed metadata, non-proprietary file formats, and open licenses permitting reuse.
Commit funding to the development and maintenance of community-led, open source infrastructure to both facilitate the sharing of research and make evaluating compliance with integrity policies achievable at scale.
Value and assess responsible research practices, including sharing of research protocols and outputs (data, code, tangible materials, etc.), study preregistration, and use of reporting guidelines to standardize information and increase reproducibility.
Explore ways to improve incentive structures to explicitly reward open and responsible research practices, including incorporating sample language from the open science toolkit developed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science.
Solicit regular feedback on research integrity policies from both grantees and the wider academic community – including experts on copyright, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), new research technologies (e.g., AI), open research, and responsible metrics – to foment co-creation and iterative improvement in policy language and requirements.
We believe implementing the above actions – like ensuring use of persistent identifiers, detailed metadata, and open licenses – will improve research integrity by maximizing not just the availability of research outputs but also their verifiability and reusability. Adhering to community-developed principles and soliciting community feedback will help ensure that research is shared responsibly and with equity in mind. And designing incentive structures to explicitly reward open and responsible research practices will stimulate the deep and long-lasting cultural change needed to improve research integrity.
Read the ORFG’s response in its entirety here.