NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) Program—along with NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD)—promotes the full and open sharing of all data, metadata, documentation, models, images, and research results as well as the source code used to generate, manipulate, and analyze these elements. However, this is not the case at all federal agencies. An updated federal policy guideline from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) aims to provide greater public access to federally funded research by making the results of taxpayer-supported research immediately available to the American public at no cost.
While NASA’s ESDS already provides unrestricted access to more than 73 petabytes of Earth science data in the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), federal agencies without such data and research-sharing policies will work with OSTP to update their public access and data sharing plans by mid-2023. OSTP expects all agencies to have updated public access policies fully implemented by the end of 2025.
