Title 42 — The Public Health and WelfareRelease 119-73not60

§19053 Research Reproducibility and Replicability

Title 42 › Chapter 163— RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, COMPETITION, AND INNOVATION › Subchapter III— NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION FOR THE FUTURE › Part E— Fundamental Research › § 19053

Last updated Apr 5, 2026|Official source

Summary

The Director must make research data, software, and code from Foundation-funded projects available to the public, while still protecting privacy, intellectual property, and security. Every funding proposal must include a machine-readable data management plan that explains how the project’s data, software, and code will be archived and kept available. The Director must give researchers, students, program officers, and review panels training and resources so they can write, review, and treat these plans as important parts of proposals. The Director must work with other agencies and the scientific community to set rules for trusted open repositories that fit different fields and protect sensitive information. The Director must find gaps and competitively fund colleges and nonprofits to build, improve, and run such repositories. The Director must help create one public website to find repositories, encourage depositing data and code at publication when possible, and work with publishers and agencies on shared standards for archiving and sharing. The Director must also fund open-source tools for reproducibility, studies on computational reproducibility, and education and training on sharing data, code, and metadata.

Full Legal Text

Title 42, §19053

The Public Health and Welfare — Source: USLM XML via OLRC

(a)Consistent with existing Federal law for privacy, intellectual property, and security, the Director shall facilitate public access to research products, including data, software, and code, developed as part of Foundation-supported projects.

(b)(1)The Director shall require that every proposal for funding for research include a machine-readable data management plan that includes a description of how the awardee will archive and preserve public access to data, software, and code developed as part of the proposed project.

(2)In carrying out the requirement in paragraph (1), the Director shall—

(A)provide necessary resources, including trainings and workshops, to educate researchers and students on how to develop and review high quality data management plans;

(B)ensure program officers and merit review panels are equipped with the resources and training necessary to review the quality of data management plans; and

(C)ensure program officers and merit review panels treat data management plans as essential elements of award proposals, where appropriate.

(c)The Director shall—

(1)consult with the heads of other Federal research agencies, as appropriate, and solicit input from the scientific community, to develop and widely disseminate a set of criteria for trusted open repositories to be used by Foundation-funded researchers, accounting for discipline-specific needs and necessary protections for sensitive information;

(2)work with stakeholders to identify significant gaps in available repositories meeting the criteria developed under paragraph (1) and options for supporting the development of additional or enhanced repositories;

(3)make awards on a competitive basis to institutions of higher education or non-profit organizations (or consortia of such institutions or organizations) for the development, upgrades, and maintenance of open data repositories that meet the criteria developed under paragraph (1);

(4)work with stakeholders and build on existing models, where appropriate, to establish a single, public, web-based point of access to help users locate repositories storing data, software, and code resulting from or used in Foundation-supported projects;

(5)work with stakeholders to establish the necessary policies and procedures and allocate the necessary resources to ensure, as practicable, data underlying published findings resulting from Foundation-supported projects are deposited in repositories meeting the criteria developed under paragraph (1) at the time of publication;

(6)incentivize the deposition of data, software, and code into repositories that meet the criteria developed under paragraph (1); and

(7)coordinate with the scientific publishing community and the heads of other relevant Federal departments and agencies to support the development of voluntary consensus standards around data archiving and sharing.

(d)The Director shall make awards, on a competitive basis to institutions of higher education or non-profit organizations (or consortia of such institutions or organizations) to—

(1)support research and development of open source, sustainable, usable tools and infrastructure that support reproducibility for a broad range of studies across different disciplines;

(2)support research on computational reproducibility, including the limits of reproducibility and the consistency of computational results in the development of new computation hardware, tools, and methods; and

(3)support the education and training of students, faculty, and researchers on computational methods, tools, and techniques to improve the quality and sharing of data, code, and supporting metadata to produce reproducible research.

Reference

Citations & Metadata

Citation

42 U.S.C. § 19053

Title 42 — The Public Health and Welfare

Last Updated

Apr 5, 2026

Release point: 119-73not60