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In February 2013, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum to all agency and department heads entitled, “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research”.
The memo directed federal agencies that award more than $100 million in research grants to develop plans for increasing public access to peer-reviewed scientific publications. It also requires researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from their federally funded research. (At the same time, the OSTP directive acknowledges that access to some data needs to be controlled to protect human privacy, confidentiality of business secrets, intellectual property interests, and other reasons.)
The OSTP recognizes that research data are valuable and need to be preserved. Increased public access to data – along with better access to the published literature – is fundamental to research, and permits