2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

On August 25, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released new guidelines on increased public access to the results of federally funded research. The new policy guidelines require immediate public access to data underlying federally funded research upon publication, to the extent possible, within legal, policy, or funder limitations. The OSTP has set December 31, 2025 as the deadline for all agency public access policies for publications and data to be in effect. As engineering and data management specialist librarians, we provide research support and open science guidance to engineering faculty and students and respond to questions about data sharing and data repositories. With the deadline for public access policies for all research data resulting from federally funded research coming up in two years, we decided to investigate the scope and policies of existing engineering data repositories and how they fit the new OSTP requirements.

A literature review we conducted did not yield many articles that covered guidelines for engineering faculty and librarians for depositing research data into appropriate repositories. The purpose of this study is to create an engineering-specific resource on data-sharing that follows good practices. Our goal is to educate on the current landscape of data sharing, data curation, and engineering data deposits to optimize discovery and reuse.

As part of our study methodology, we queried the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data.org) to make an initial repository list to evaluate; selecting for “Engineering Sciences” and filtering for “disciplinary” yielded 193 potential sites to investigate, out of a total of 693. The remaining repositories were further reduced by removing those that did not accept uploads, had location restrictions outside of North America, were no longer functional, or had datasets of interest to engineers, but did not accept uploads from engineers. The second pass pared the list down to 70 repositories, which were evaluated against the OSTP guidelines. We report on the results with respect to existing engineering repositories, and discuss the implications of the OSTP requirements for engineering and data library support.