Under Trump, Scientists May Get a Break on Data-Sharing

For academic researchers struggling to find a silver lining in the election of Donald J. Trump as U.S. president, their universities’ leading lobby association has a thought: It may mean a delay in new data-sharing rules.

Almost four years after the Obama administration ordered federal agencies to make plans for requiring the public sharing of articles and data from government-sponsored research, the agencies’ policies are almost complete and ready to be put in place.

But the Association of American Universities, which represents the nation’s premiere research institutions, is concerned that those policies aren’t sufficiently synchronized. And if they aren’t better aligned before they go into effect, the AAU contends, researchers will face an array of differing expectations and formats for recording, storing, and reporting their data.

In that sense, the election of Mr. Trump, with his generally skeptical approach to regulations, is “probably a positive,” said Tobin L. Smith, vice president for policy at the AAU, since a potential Clinton administration probably would have moved much faster in imposing the agency-by-agency data-sharing plans developed in the Obama administration.

It’s “not that we don’t want to move in the direction to ensure open data access,” Mr. Smith said. “But a lot of questions have to be answered.”

Others involved in university research community who are more directly tied to the open-access movement said they don’t disagree with the bottom line of the AAU’s analysis but would prefer to keep pushing ahead with putting those policies in place.

Twenty of the 22 federal agencies covered by the administration’s order have already issued their data-sharing plans. Those agency plans are “definitely not 100 percent” in alignment with each other, open-access advocate Heather Joseph acknowledged, and “the focus on that harmonization has to continue.”

But that shouldn’t be an excuse to pull back while work on greater harmonization and alignment continues, said Ms. Joseph, who is executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

Another leading open-access advocate, Brian A. Nosek, the co-founder and director of the nonprofit Center for Open Science, agreed that differences in agency policies should be manageable. “My working assumption is that most variation will be quite straightforward to address,” said Mr. Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.

Mr. Nosek’s Center for Open Science is developing software to help researchers share their work and data, and that software includes capabilities to help synchronize databases that use somewhat different formatting and notational standards.

The center’s leaders are less concerned about the possibility of some delays in putting the agencies’ new policies into effect during a presidential transition — which they see as inevitable regardless of party control — than they are with the possibility that an open-access approach to science could be undermined or even undone by a new administration.

“That would be a major setback and far more damaging than having multiple requirements or potentially having to tune them,” said the center’s other co-founder, Jeffrey R. Spies.

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The federal government spends more than $140 billion a year on scientific research and development, and the push to make the results freely available to all scientists has been a multidecade endeavor. Advocates have had growing success in recent years in making journal publications based on federally sponsored science freely available. But enabling open access to scientific data has been a tougher slog, for a variety of reasons, including the complexity of assigning credit to its developers and uniformity in its presentation.

The National Institutes of Health, the single largest provider of basic research money to universities, is an example of the need for more time to work on details, Mr. Smith said. The NIH announced its data-sharing plan in February 2015, but just last week the agency issued another request for public input on the data standards and strategies that should underlie the plan.

Open-access advocates, meanwhile, are anxious to solidify the gains they’ve made to date. One possible concern involves a publisher-led initiative known as Chorus, which announced last week the addition of the University of Denver to a pilot project involving the University of Florida. As part of the project, Chorus — the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States — will give the university technical assistance to help it identify journal articles that involved federally sponsored research.

Ms. Joseph said publishers founded Chorus almost immediately after the Obama administration ordered federal agencies in 2013 to create their open-access plans. She described Chorus as means for technically complying with the 2013 order by permitting reader access to articles within journal websites, as opposed to creating separate online repositories of articles, meaning the journals keep control over key tools such as bulk downloads and text and data mining.

The Center for Open Science shares some of that concern, since “lock-in as a strategy is always worrying with respect to commercial publisher motivations,” Mr. Spies said. But ultimately, he said, the Center is confident in the leadership of Chorus and its willingness to help make data publicly available.

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.