Public Access to Federally Funded Research Data: Were the mandates working?
Location
Online
Start Date
21-10-2025 12:55 PM
End Date
21-10-2025 1:35 PM
Description
Data is the “new oil”, the currency of business in the 21st century and as such research organisations are probing the ways in which their data and the policies behind it are used, reused and shared. In a word, these organisations want to know their data has an impact. The US Federal Government is no different. In 2013, the “Holdren Memo” and the Office of Management and Budget’s M-13-13 laid out principles and goals to make all federally funded data publicly available. These memos applied to agencies with R&D budgets over $100,000,000. Nearly 10 years and many policies later many agencies are now trying to assess the work they have done in this arena. Agencies began implementing their public access plans in 2015 and now, ten years later, many are attempting to identify impacts and quantify the outputs of these policies. The process has brought to light questions such as how do agencies define impact? What do views and downloads mean when applied to datasets? And, are these programs successful? Bringing together strands of research from the author’s in progress PhD thesis (with the Gateway Ph.D. at SJSU), this presentation will cover the policies mandated by the memos, the state of outcomes prior to 2025, and changes in the federal government’s attitude toward public access.
Public Access to Federally Funded Research Data: Were the mandates working?
Online
Data is the “new oil”, the currency of business in the 21st century and as such research organisations are probing the ways in which their data and the policies behind it are used, reused and shared. In a word, these organisations want to know their data has an impact. The US Federal Government is no different. In 2013, the “Holdren Memo” and the Office of Management and Budget’s M-13-13 laid out principles and goals to make all federally funded data publicly available. These memos applied to agencies with R&D budgets over $100,000,000. Nearly 10 years and many policies later many agencies are now trying to assess the work they have done in this arena. Agencies began implementing their public access plans in 2015 and now, ten years later, many are attempting to identify impacts and quantify the outputs of these policies. The process has brought to light questions such as how do agencies define impact? What do views and downloads mean when applied to datasets? And, are these programs successful? Bringing together strands of research from the author’s in progress PhD thesis (with the Gateway Ph.D. at SJSU), this presentation will cover the policies mandated by the memos, the state of outcomes prior to 2025, and changes in the federal government’s attitude toward public access.
