Considering Government Information in the Age of the Nelson Memo
Advancing preservation and access for public information is a collaborative endeavor that takes many hands and many perspectives. One challenge we encounter in our work with born-digital government information is that, all too often, conversations flourish within a community of practice but do not flow into and throughout others with overlapping expertise and interests. At the PEGI Project, we seek to connect efforts and communities so that those working from a variety of perspectives can collectively translate their experience as it applies to areas of mutual concern.
Over the past year, focus on research data management for federally funded research has increased dramatically. This shift is due in significant part to an August 2022 memo from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), entitled “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research.” Known as the Nelson Memo, this memorandum requires federal agencies to make federally funded publications and data freely available without an embargo. This statement builds on previous efforts, in particular the February 2013 OSTP memo “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,” which directed agencies to create plans for increasing open access to federally funded research. The Nelson Memo goes further by giving federal agencies a specific timeline (by December 31, 2025) to create updated open access policies that mandate making federally funded publications and data accessible without embargo.
This shift in policy is driven by the principle that as the federal government funds research, the output of these efforts should be available to all. This core idea is welcome by the open access and library communities, and the impact of this memo is far-reaching and will shape institutional repositories, data repositories, the publishing community, and more for decades to come.
While the Nelson memo focuses on the outputs of research funded by the federal government, it is important to acknowledge the interconnectedness between federally funded research and federally produced research. This second category includes research conducted by agencies or contractors on the agency’s behalf. Federally produced data and public information are crucial for federally funded research; these types of sources exist in symbiosis.
Researchers often use federally produced data as key portions of their research agendas. For example, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is a federally-produced source for data on health issues. Researchers can use this study both to conduct secondary data analysis and also to inform their own data collection. Federal agencies, such as the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), could fund the additional data collection, which would need to be made available under OSTP guidelines. In turn, researcher driven discoveries funded by federal agencies could inform the future development of federal surveys like NHANES. This cyclical interaction between federally produced data and federally funded research occurs in many areas of potential relevance to policymakers.
Federal research and development programs are also in many cases inextricably intertwined with scientific research programs. For example, NASA supports open science by prioritizing public access to research data outputs across its broad mission. By making research data and other products available from both agency-led and contractor-led research and development, as well as those from NASA research opportunities and other sponsored projects, NASA contributes to the overall body of federal research available to the public.
We maintain that open science can benefit from the perspectives of government information specialists who generally focus on federally produced data and information. We also recognize the corresponding value for an increased focus on data management principles as applied to resources that are considered part of the traditional ‘universe’ of government information. For example, we in the government information community should build on the consensus that the FAIR Principles are a viable model for considering how best to optimize discoverability, computational interoperability, and long-term reusability for digital information. In addition, we can draw on the CARE Principles, which address the control of data and the ethics of sharing. While focused on Indigenous data sovereignty, these principles have also generated broad conversations about the ethics of data collection and sharing in marginalized communities. These areas invite further research and discussion.
In 2019, the PEGI Project National Forum Summary and Report identified and summarized barriers to gaining cross-sector consensus for collective action to preserve born-digital government information. These include working with terminology that may be imprecise or may differ among communities of practice, and agreeing on ways to measure progress. We recognize challenges like these are further complicated by the landscape of limited resources available for academic institutions that are preparing for the potential impact of the Nelson Memo. Nevertheless, the opportunity to build capacity for libraries to work together remains clear and strong. In the coming year, we hope to explore wider participation in academic and data communities as we seek to build and support connections that can generate solutions.