Background

In December 2019 Johns Hopkins convened a meeting to discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by the use of open infrastructure as it relates to satisfying federal policies for academic research funded by U.S. federal agencies. In attendance were representatives from the NIH, NSF, and OSTI. Academic institutions were represented by Arizona State University, the California Digital Library, Duke University, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, MIT, and the University of Notre Dame. Attendees believe there is a role for open infrastructure and services to facilitate compliance with federal policies, and that implementing open technology in this space has potential benefits for all parties involved, including researchers, institutions, and federal funding agencies.

This meeting focused specifically on the transfer of federally funded research materials to federal information systems, normally undertaken by a researcher at, or near, the time of publication of their research in an academic journal. Some journals deposit research materials to federal agencies on behalf of the researcher, but in other cases the task must be undertaken by the researcher themself. Navigating this process can present barriers to ensuring a timely and complete submission to federal repositories. The attendees agreed that new mechanisms should be explored to lower the barriers for these transactions, and recognized the potential efficiencies realized by adoption of uniform processes across agencies and institutions. To that end, attendees focused on facilitating automated deposit of research materials to agency systems.

Three challenges

Three fundamental challenges were identified as critical for facilitating the deposit of research materials to federal systems:

  1. Trust on the part of the federal agency that the information describing the information being submitted is complete and correct,
  2. Ability of the sender to receive updates on the status of a submission,
  3. The metadata present in the submission meets the requirements of the federal agency in content and format.

First Steps

The meeting attendees agreed that a first step toward addressing these concerns would be to endorse a set of recommendations which includes the use of BagIt to submit materials to federal agencies, and development of a conceptual model describing the content of the bag and its metadata.