The 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Memo on federally-funded research directed agencies with research and development budgets above $100 million to develop and release plans to increase and broaden access to research results, both published literature and data. The agency responses have generated discussion and interest but are yet to be analyzed and compared. In this paper, we examine how 19 federal agencies responded to the memo, written by John Holdren, on issues of scientific data and the extent of their compliance to the directives outlined in the memo. We present a varied picture of the readiness of federal science agencies to comply with the memo through a comparative analysis and close reading of the contents of these responses. While some agencies, particularly those with a long history of supporting and conducting science, scored well, other responses indicate that some agencies have only taken a few steps towards implementing policies that comply with the memo. These results are of interest to the data curation community as they reveal how different agencies across the federal government approach their responsibilities for research data management, and how new policies and requirements might continue to affect scientists and research communities.Keywords: open data; office of science and techology policy; data access; metadata IntroductionOn February 22, 2013, John Holdren, Director of the Obama Administration's Office of Science and Technology Policy, issued a memo to the heads of other government agencies entitled "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research" (Holdren, 2013). This document outlines a vision for both academic papers and scientific data requiring federal agencies with annual research and development budgets above $100 million to draft a plan explaining how they will increase access to the research products produced with federal support. The memo identified eight elements to be included in agency responses. These elements reflect the values and perspective of the Obama administration on federal science, and suggest how the affected agencies, ranging from the Department of Defense to the US Geological Survey, might respond to the Holdren memo. The effects of new agency policies will be felt by intramural (government employed) and extramural (grant-funded) researchers into the future, therefore making these plans and responses important harbingers of what is to come when plans are fully implemented.The memo has generated much discussion in academia and the popular press. Many of these are speculative or editorial in nature (e.g. Berman & Cerf, 2013;Corneliussen, 2016; Franceschi-Bicchierai, 2013; Murphy, 2016; Van Noorden, 2013), but some cite the Holdren memo as inspiration or evidence of the importance of research data. In particular, the memo stimulated the examination of data sharing practices and open access policies (Bishoff and Johnston, 2015; Van Tuyl and Whitmire, 2016). Current published literature, however, has not presented an...
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