Additional Requirements and Guidance for Digital Data Management

The following requirements and guidance provided by the BER program office supplement but do not replace the requirements and guidance in the Office of Science Statement on Digital Data Management.

Subprogram Requirements

Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division (EESSD).

Research data obtained through public funding are a public trust. As such, these data must be publicly accessible. To be in compliance with the data policy of the U.S. Global Change Research Program of full and open access to global change research data and the Office of Science Statement on Digital Data Management, the required Data Management Plan (DMP) must include a description of the researcher's data sharing plans if the proposed research involves the acquisition of data in the course of the research that would be of use to the climate research and assessment communities. This includes data from extensive, long-term observations and experiments and from long-term model simulations of climate that would be costly to duplicate. The DMP must describe plans for sharing the data that are to be acquired in the course of the proposed research, particularly how the acquired data will be preserved, documented, and quality assured, and where it will be archived for access by others. Data of potentially broad use in climate change research and assessments should be archived, when possible, in data repositories for subsequent dissemination. Relevant EESSD-funded data repositories include:

The repository where the researcher intends to archive the data should be notified in advance of the intention, contingent on a successful outcome of the application review. If data are to be archived at the researcher's home institution or in some other location, the application must describe how, where, and for how long the data will be documented and archived for access by others.

Researchers are allowed an initial period of exclusive use of the acquired data to quality assure it and to publish papers based on the data, but they are strongly encouraged to make the data openly available as soon as possible after this period. NOTE: The Office of Science Digital Data PolicyStatement on Digital Data Management requires that “all research data displayed in publications resulting from the proposed research (be) digitally accessible at the time of publication.” In this context, research data is defined as the data required to validate the published results. The exclusive use period for additional research data is defined to be one year after the end of the data acquisition period for the proposed performance period of the award but exceptions to extend this period may be justified for unique or extenuating circumstances.

Genomic Sciences Research

The Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program requires that all publishable data, metadata and software resulting from research funded by the Genomic Science Program must conform to community recognized standard formats, when they exist, be clearly attributable, and be deposited within a community recognized public database(s) appropriate for the research. Publication related data which are consistent with the data and analysis models of the DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) should be accessible to KBase and could be integrated into KBase. All digitally accessible data obtained as a result of research funded by the Genomic Science Program must be kept in an archive maintained by the Principal Investigator (PI) for the duration of the funded project. Any publications resulting from the use of shared data must accurately acknowledge the original source or provider of the attributable data. The publication of information resulting from research funded by the Genomic Science Program must be consistent with the Intellectual Property provisions of the contract under which the publishable information was produced.

A more detailed description of the Genomic Science data sharing policy is available at http://genomicscience.energy.gov/datasharing/.