NSF is beginning to grapple with the thorny issues of data policies, such as what are the goals for such policies, how has data publication impacted innovation, what is the early experience with the NSF-wide requirement, what are the impacts on research universities, what are the legal complexities, how should the various repositories be funded and to what extent should NSF assist in development and adoption of standards?
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National Science Foundation
Media Advisory 11-009
National Science Board Task Force on Data Policies to Hold Expert Panel Discussion on March 28-29 at NSF Headquarters
March 21, 2011
The National Science Board's (NSB) Committee on Strategy and Budget (CSB), Task Force on Data Policies will host a two-day expert panel discussion on March 28 and 29, at the National Science Foundation (NSF) headquarters in Arlington, Va.
Experts from across the United States and from the United Kingdom and Germany will participate in this workshop discussion. The full meeting agenda is online.
Members of the media and the public are invited to the meeting. Highlights include:
MONDAY, MARCH 28, 2011
8:20a.m. - 10 a.m. Session I: The Vision of Data-Intensive Science
Guiding questions: What are some of the defining characteristics of data-intensive science? What are the goals for enabling re-use and re-purposing of data? What new opportunities and new types of science have yet to be realized? These questions build upon the vision for a new NSF-wide program in computational and data-intensive science.
10:15 a.m. - 12 p.m. Session II: Reproducibility, First Steps and Guiding Principles
Guiding questions: Reproducibility starts to scope the problem and drives all sorts of related issues (curation, cost, etc.). What does this mean for types of discovery that need data sharing? What are the implications for data publishing and data citation? Would complete data release include the original, "raw" data; cleaned-up, publication-ready data, along with the methods for clean-up; publication-ready data with the meta-data necessary to reproduce any interpretations of the data; raw data with software to make it usable to others; data organized in a way that is interoperable to some standard; etc.?
12:30 p.m. Lunch Presentation: High Performance Cyberinfrastructure is Needed to Enable Data-Intensive Science and Engineering
Dr. Larry Smarr, Harry E. Gruber Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University Of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering; and Director, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
1 p.m. - 3 p.m. Session III: Exemplars, Lessons Learned
Guiding questions: What types of incentives can be created? How has data publication impacted innovation?
3:15 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. Session IV: Impacts
Guiding questions: What are the measurable impacts? What is the early experience with the NSF-wide requirement for Data Management Plans? What are the impacts on research universities? What are the international complexities, particularly for large facilities with international partnerships? What are the legal complexities? What is the potential for overlap of policy when comparing the curatorship of physical specimens and the management of large, and often digital, datasets?
TUESDAY, MARCH 29, 2011
8:30 a.m. National Science Foundation Perspective
Remarks from officials from the National Science Foundation
8:45 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. Session V: Policy Issues
Guiding questions: How do we frame the issues for institutions, government agencies, publishers and any other stakeholders? What are the relative merits of various types of repositories for data? How should the various repositories be funded? To what extent should NSF assist in development and adoption of standards for such efforts? To what extent should deposit in repositories be required of awardees?
10:45 a.m. - 11 a.m. Public Comment Period
Dr. José-Marie Griffiths will take a few comments and questions from the audience present at the workshop
11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Session IV: Policy Issues (continued)