White House Office Of Science Research Articles

Technologists as policy advisors: A conversation with Dr. Arati Prabhakar

MIT Science Policy Review spoke with Dr. Arati Prabhakar about the role scientists and engineers play in public policy. Dr. Prabhakar is the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where she works to harness “the power of science, technology, and innovation to achieve America’s greatest aspirations” [1]. In her current role, Dr. Prabhakar is the President’s Chief Advisor for Science and Technology, a member of the President’s Cabinet, and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Previously, Dr. Prabhakar served as the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Between Directorships, Dr. Prabhakar worked to advance innovation in the private sector as an industry executive and venture capitalist, focusing on early-stage semiconductors and cleantech. In 2019, Dr. Prabhakar co-founded Actuate, a nonprofit research and development organization tackling issues in climate change, data security, and health outcomes. We spoke with Dr. Prabhakar about hercareer journey to OSTP and how the White House guides U.S. scientific and technological priorities.

Through the Eye of a Needle [From the Editor’s Desk

On 31 December 2022, Steve Welby resigned from his position as executive director and chief operating officer (COO) of IEEE. Welby came to IEEE in January 2018, after serving for one term in the Obama administration as U.S. assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering. When he arrived at IEEE headquarters, Welby signed on for a five-year term. When he left at the end of last year, Welby announced that he wanted to spend more time with his family while exploring career options. Steve didn’t spend much time exploring. After coming home to his family who never left the Washington DC area, he returned to government service. His LinkedIn profile shows in February of this year serves in a new position as Deputy Director, National Security, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Serving as IEEE Division II director and as a member of the IEEE Board of Directors from 2018 to 2020, I had an opportunity to directly engage with Steve during the four-day Board Series meetings held four times per year. I had a front row seat observing Steve. I believe Welby was a transformational leader for IEEE and a consummate professional. “Through the eye of a needle” is, of course, a metaphor for navigating through a very narrow opening. I learned this to be one of Steve’s special skills.

Public Access to Federally Funded Research

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a new memo requiring all federal agencies that fund research provide immediate public access to resulting research data and scholarly publications. This new memo removes the option of a 12 months embargo, and it extends the requirement agencies with less than $100 million in annual research and development expenditures. This column investigates the possible impacts of the broader policy, including introducing the public access requirement to new agencies and academic disciplines, and how a repository approach to public access might intersect with publisher provided open access.

Strategic Thinking for Bold Goals

Strategic Thinking for Bold Goals

Developing Supportive Bioeconomy Policies

Developing Supportive Bioeconomy Policies

Publish, Don’t Perish: Recommendations for Mitigating Impacts of the New Federal Open Access Policy

In August, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a new policy requiring that all federally funded scholarly research be accessible to the public immediately upon publication. While this open access policy will ultimately benefit society by increasing the availability of data and research outputs, it could place a heavy burden on researchers due to the relatively high cost of open access alongside an academic culture that tends to favor publishing in high impact subscription journals. We examine the complexities of the traditional publishing landscape and offer recommendations for agencies, universities, and publishers to mitigate the impacts on researchers. Specifically, we recommend a short-term increase in funding to cover higher publishing costs, but contributions from all stakeholders are needed to facilitate a long-term solution.

Impact of the 2022 OSTP memo: A bibliometric analysis of US federally funded publications, 2017–2021

AbstractOn August 25, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a memo regarding public access to scientific research. Signed by Director Alondra Nelson, this updated guidance eliminated the 12-month embargo period on publications arising from U.S. federal funding that had been allowed from a previous 2013 OSTP memo. Although reactions to this updated federal guidance have been plentiful, to date there has not been a detailed analysis of the publications that would fall under this new framework. The OSTP released a companion report along with the memo, but it only provided a broad estimate of total numbers affected per year. Therefore, this study seeks to more deeply investigate the characteristics of U.S. federally funded research over a 5-year period from 2017–2021 to better understand the updated guidance’s impact. It uses a manually created custom filter in the Dimensions database to return only publications that arise from U.S. federal funding. Results show that an average of 265,000 articles were published each year that acknowledge US federal funding agencies, and these research outputs are further examined by publisher, journal title, institutions, and Open Access status. Interactive versions of the graphs are available at https://ostp.lib.iastate.edu/.

White House releases new scientific integrity guidelines

Every US funding agency will be required to designate a scientific integrity official, and agencies that fund, conduct, or oversee research will have to establish the position of chief science officer under new guidelines released Jan. 12 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The guidelines create a single definition of scientific integrity and provide a model policy to help agencies as they update and revise their existing integrity plans. OSTP also is creating a subcommittee on scientific integrity in the National Science and Technology Council, a group that discusses and coordinates policy across federal research agencies. “Every agency now has a responsibility to make sure its expert staff know their rights, and that political appointees know that these rules will be taken seriously and they will be held accountable if they break them,” Jacob Carter, research director for the Center for Science and Democracy at

Scholarly Publishing With the American Urological Association—The Expansion of the “Voice of Urology” Into Open Access With the Journal of Urology Open Plus

Scholarly Publishing With the American Urological Association—The Expansion of the “Voice of Urology” Into Open Access With the Journal of Urology Open Plus

Anesthesiology 2023: Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.

Anesthesiology 2023: Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.

Comments of the Knowing Machines Research Project to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on Automated Worker Surveillance and Management

Comments of the Knowing Machines Research Project to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on Automated Worker Surveillance and Management

Appoint a new NIH director, now

Why has President Biden's administration been staggering when it comes to key scientific appointments? Most noticeably, there has been a failure to confirm a new director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since Francis Collins stepped down a year ago. It took nearly a year to nominate the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Robert Califf. And regrettably, Biden began his presidency with the nomination of geneticist Eric Lander as the first science adviser to the president and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). A year later, Lander resigned in disgrace because of abusive behavior toward staff. Although recent appointments provide some confidence [including Monica Bertagnolli as director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Joni Rutter as director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, and Arati Prabhakar as the new director of OSTP], the most high-profile biomedical job in the United States-NIH director-remains unfilled.

Journal Editorial: “UO Libraries Supports New U.S. Policy Making Research Results Available Immediately”

The letter below was written to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in response to its August 2022 memorandum establishing new federal policy on public access to the products of publicly funded research. At the University of Oregon, our students benefit from access to the widest possible range of newly published scholarly information through our Library’s subscriptions and e- resource collections. This access costs millions of dollars annually, much of it paid to the private, for- profit companies who collect and publish research. Many members of the public—including students at less well-funded institutions; high school students and K12 teachers; and curious learners unaffiliated with any university—lack the ability to read and learn from the latest scientific and medical information because the subscriptions are so unaffordable. This lack of access hinders scientific progress and is particularly unfair when considering that the public funds the underlying research activity through their tax dollars. The OSTP’s updated policy will ensure that when the government funds research—by providing grants to buy equipment, materials, hire researchers, run analyses, and more—that the findings from that research are immediately returned to the public for their benefit. We hope that this policy also means that the UO Library will be able to spend less every year on paying for these subscriptions, which will enable us to invest more directly in our students, faculty, and their important teaching and research work. We are proud to support the Oregon Undergraduate Research Journal as an open scholarly communications forum that undergraduates everywhere can read without cost. The UO and its Libraries will continue to advocate strongly for a fair and inclusive research communications system that everyone can afford to participate in.

A Study of Using Machine Learning in Predicting COVID-19 Cases

With an unprecedented challenge to combat COVID-19, the prediction of confirmed cases is very important to ensure medical aid and healthy living conditions. In order to predict confirmed cases, the current study uses a dataset prepared by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy which brought together companies and research to address questions concerning COVID-19. The importance of this was to identify factors that seem to affect the transmission rate of COVID-19. The focus of the current research, however, is to predict global cases of COVID-19. There have been many papers written about the prediction of confirmed cases and fatalities, but they failed to show promising results. Our research applies machine learning for predicting fatalities in the world using the COVID-19 Forecasting dataset from Kaggle. After trying several algorithms, our findings reveal that Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, KNeighbors, GaussianNB, and Random Forest algorithms provide the best predictions. Thus, the results show Random Forest as having the highest accuracy followed by Logistic Regression and Decision Tree. The results are promising opening up the door for further research.

Research security guidelines could unify reporting requirements

Long-awaited US guidelines designed to make reporting collaborations and funding more straightforward and transparent were released by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in a Jan. 4 report. The guidelines tell federal agencies that fund scientific research how to implement National Security Presidential Memorandum 33, a research security directive issued by former president Donald J. Trump in response to fears that China is trying to unlawfully appropriate US academic research. Agencies have been working together to come up with consistent requirements. The results could have a big impact on universities and individual researchers as they try to navigate grant applications and conflict-of-interest disclosures at a time when academic research—especially international collaborations and funding—has come under increased scrutiny. Only one part of the OSTP guidance is mandatory: agencies must create rules that do not discriminate. Many scientists have said that the current response to fears that China

First science adviser in US president's cabinet talks COVID, spying and more.

Eric Lander spoke to Nature during his first day as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Eric Lander spoke to Nature during his first day as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

What Worked, What Did Not: University Instruction during a Pandemic

What Worked, What Did Not: University Instruction during a Pandemic

Eric Lander addresses controversies at hearing

US president Joe Biden’s decision to elevate the role of presidential science adviser to cabinet level fulfills his campaign promise to return science to a place of prominence in government. In many ways, his choice of Eric Lander to fill that position and lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is an obvious one. Lander, a mathematician and geneticist at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, earned fame for his role in the international Human Genome Project. He is lauded for his ability to make science both interesting and understandable, and he cochaired the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) under former president Barack Obama. But in recent years, critics have charged that Lander has been dismissive of or insensitive to women and people of color, most notably by praising the contributions of a male colleague while minimizing the Nobel Prize–winning CRISPR genome-editing

Astrobiology as a NASA Grand Challenge

Are we alone is a question whose ambition can only be met with a NASA-led global collaboration. In this white paper, we describe how this makes The Search for Life Beyond Earth a new Grand for NASA. As described in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the White House National Economic Council, Grand Challenges are ambitious but achievable goals that harness science, technology, and innovation to solve important national or global problems and that have the potential to capture the public's imagination. NASA had identified an Grand Challenge centered on the Asteroid Retrieval Mission, which was closed out in June, 2017. Here, we explain how NASA's next Grand could be focused on The Search for Life Beyond Earth, with a flagship-scale mission in Astrophysics as its centerpiece.

Collaborating in the Time of COVID-19: The Scope and Scale of Innovative Responses to a Global Pandemic.

The emergence of COVID-19 spurred the formation of myriad teams to tackle every conceivable aspect of the virus and thwart its spread. Enabled by global digital connectedness, collaboration has become a constant theme throughout the pandemic, resulting in the expedition of the scientific process (including vaccine development), rapid consolidation of global outbreak data and statistics, and experimentation with novel partnerships. To document the evolution of these collaborative efforts, the authors collected illustrative examples as the pandemic unfolded, supplemented with publications from the JMIR COVID-19 Special Issue. Over 60 projects rooted in collaboration are categorized into five main themes: knowledge dissemination, data propagation, crowdsourcing, artificial intelligence, and hardware design and development. They highlight the numerous ways that citizens, industry professionals, researchers, and academics have come together worldwide to consolidate information and produce products to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, researchers and citizen scientists scrambled to access quality data within an overwhelming quantity of information. As global curated data sets emerged, derivative works such as visualizations or models were developed that depended on consistent data and would fail when there were unanticipated changes. Crowdsourcing was used to collect and analyze data, aid in contact tracing, and produce personal protective equipment by sharing open designs for 3D printing. An international consortium of entrepreneurs and researchers created a ventilator based on an open-source design. A coalition of nongovernmental organizations and governmental organizations, led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, created a shared open resource of over 200,000 research publications about COVID-19 and subsequently offered cash prizes for the best solutions to 17 key questions involving artificial intelligence. A thread of collaboration weaved throughout the pandemic response, which will shape future efforts. Novel partnerships will cross boundaries to create better processes, products, and solutions to consequential societal challenges.