Workshop Series to Gauge Community Requirements for Public Access to Data from NSF-Funded Research

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This project seeks to engage stakeholders from the branches of science represented by the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate at the NSF -- astronomy, chemistry, materials research, mathematics and physics -- into an active dialogue aimed at making publicly available the results of scientific research sponsored by NSF. Scientists with a broad variety of expertise will come together for a series of workshops to discuss the possibilities of scientific and educational reuse of data (which data is useful and what should be preserved?), the cyberinfrastructure needs for making data publicly available (what data access methods are required, what sort of accompanying metadata will be needed for easy access, and what are the parameters of the necessary archival storage?) and the commonality aspects of public access (how much of the existing infrastructure can serve multiple disciplines?) The answers to these questions are expected to be discipline dependent, but promoting a dialogue between communities is necessary in order to identify best practices and cost-effective solutions to serve the community needs and to help pave the way to a world with broad public access to scientific data.Making research data broadly available opens the scientific enterprise to citizen scientists and other researchers and enhances the potential for discovery. Recognizing that the transition from the Digital Age to the Big Data Age provides also the technical means needed to make public the research data from a wide variety of scientific inquiries, the workshops supported by this project will work towards a framework by which public access can be accomplished. Economies of scale are expected by combining projects and infrastructure across various disciplines. As such, this effort will identify new opportunities for interdisciplinary research by emphasizing the dataset and metadata interoperability in the design of archival systems.