This past January Obama signed the America COMPETES Re-authorization Act. It contains two interesting sections that advance the notions of open data and the federal role in supporting online access to scientific archives: 103 and 104, which read in part:
“§ 103: The Director [of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the Whitehouse] shall establish a working group under the National Science and Technology Council with the responsibility to coordinate Federal science agency research and policies related to the dissemination and long-term stewardship of the results of unclassified research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications, supported wholly, or in part, by funding from the Federal science agencies.” (emphasis added)
This is a cause for celebration insofar as Congress has recognized that published articles are an incomplete communication of computational scientific knowledge, and the data (and code) must be included as well.
“§ 104: Federal Scientific Collections: The Office of Science and Technology Policy shall develop policies for the management and use of Federal scientific collections to improve the quality, organization, access, including online access, and long-term preservation of such collections for the benefit of the scientific enterprise.” (emphasis added)
I was very happy to see the importance of online access recognized, and hopefully this will include the data and code that underlies published computational results.
One step further in each of these directions: mention code explicitly and create a federally funded cloud not only for data but linked to code and computational results to advance computational reproducibility.