January 2020

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a request for comments on Draft Desirable Characteristics of Repositories for Managing and Sharing Data Resulting from Federally Funded Research in the Federal Register on January 17. The OSTP Subcommittee on Open Science is working to develop a common set of characteristics for agencies to support public access policies.

OSTP seeks comments on the appropriateness of the characteristics in two areas: “Desirable Characteristics for All Data Repositories” and “Additional Considerations for Repositories Storing Human Data.” The desirable characteristics include descriptions of persistent unique identifiers, long-term sustainability, and curation and quality assurance, among others. Additional considerations include fidelity to consent, privacy, and planning for breach, among others. The Subcommittee on Open Science is also interested in comments on the ability of existing repositories to meet the proposed desirable characteristics and the consistency of the characteristics with other criteria used to certify data repositories.

The characteristics will ultimately be used by federal agencies to assist federally funded researchers in identifying data repositories and for evaluating data management plans that include submission of data in a non-federal repository. Comments are due on March 6.