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), including Atmospheric System Research, Environmental System Science and Earth and Environmental System Modeling.
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.
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 Policy Statement 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.