Last year, NIH was one of several federal agencies to join the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in their celebration of 2023 as the Year of Open Science. During that time, NIH noted how NLM’s long-standing commitment to provide access to research products and processes aligns with the U.S. Government’s definition of open science:
The principle and practice of making research products and processes available to all, while respecting diverse cultures, maintaining security and privacy, and fostering collaborations, reproducibility, and equity.
NLM has nearly two centuries of experience delivering information to those who need it, when they need it. Of course, our offerings have evolved and expanded since our inception, long before the term “open science” was coined. Observing the Year of Open Science allowed us an opportunity to reflect and strengthen this foundation. Let’s break down this definition of open science to explore how.
Video transcript:
[Lisa Federer] The Year of Open Science was an initiative out of the Office of Science and Technology Policy that brought together over a dozen federal agencies, including the NIH and NLM. And it was really a focus on: How do we drive forward open science?
[Maryam Zaringhalam] And the idea was to raise awareness of what open science is and the various
benefits that it can have to advance policies across the government that promote more open, equitable, and secure ways of doing research to support and strengthen infrastructures that enable access to federally funded research and to create opportunities for training and capacity building, so that we're really making sure that as we're spreading the word about open science, we're also
building a workforce and opportunities to really be able to tap into the potential for open science.
[Chelle Gentemann] The hoarding of resources when you don't share data, when you don't share code, and even when you don't have access to the publications, it perpetuates these systems of privilege that can exclude people from participating in science. And we want not only science to
be more accurate, we want it to be more reproducible, more efficient. But we also want more people to participate. And that's what the heart of open science really starts to address.
[Zaringhalam] Over the course of the year, these agencies all got together every other week to discuss opportunities that we had to collaborate with one another, ways that we could create events
or programs that really engaged with different communities, and ways that we could really be pointing to and amplifying the achievements that were happening at individual agencies as well as the government as a whole.
[Richard Scheuermann] We rely on having open access to data on a daily basis. We're constantly going to the data resources that the National Library of Medicine maintains. That's focused on disseminating data freely to the research community so that they can take advantage of all this information and drive research forward.
[Zaringhalam] The year of open science was never about just one year. It was about sowing these seeds to propel us into a future. And we'll continue to think about how we as NLM can really be leaders in creating that more open and equitable and responsible future for research.
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