Back in November, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued two Requests for Information (RFI) soliciting broad public input about “the long-term preservation of, and public access to, the results of Federally-funded research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications.” Now this week, OSTP has posted the comments that it received — from scientists, citizens, publishers, scientific societies, libraries, and others.

According to the OSTP Blog (follow the link):

We received 118 comments on public access to digital data and 377 on public access to scholarly publications…

 

These comments will inform the deliberations of two interagency working groups within the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) — the Task Force on Public Access to Scholarly Publications and the Interagency Working Group on Digital Data — that were formed in response to requirements in the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010.  That law, signed by President Obama in early 2011, requires that the NSTC coordinate the development of Federal science agency policies related to the dissemination and long-term stewardship of the results of unclassified research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications, supported wholly or in part by funding from the Federal science agencies. The two groups will carefully consider all of the public comments during their deliberative process.

Check out the comments in response to the Digital Data RFI here, and to the Scholarly Publications RFI here.

And to learn more about this process, see our original blog post from last November.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)