Collaborative Research: Proposal for an NSF-Wide Workshop to Explore the Prospects for a Common Response to the Requirements for Public Access to Research Data

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This project seeks to engage representatives of the scientific and engineering communities supported by NSF 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 workshop to discuss the lessons learned in previous domain-specific workshops, identify common needs regarding knowledge preservation and open access for the scientific and engineering communities, and suggest possible requirements that will promote broad public access to data. The latter are expected to be discipline dependent, but promoting a dialogue between communities is necessary in order to identify effective 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, this workshop will play an import role towards the development of 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 cross-disciplinary research by emphasizing the dataset and metadata interoperability in the design of archival systems.