EAGER: Open Infrastructure to Reduce Burden on Researchers and Federal Agencies

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

Johns Hopkins University, in partnership with six other institutions, proposes to design a set of recommendations, use cases, specifications, and workflows that will transform the deposit of manuscripts into federal agency repositories, thereby reducing burden on researchers, universities, and federal agencies. This early exploratory research undertakes to develop solutions for issues that arise when projects are multi-institution, federal agency workflows are vastly different, and the integrity of information is critical. As research becomes increasingly convergent, there is a major risk of an increasingly complex environment for investigators, universities, and funding agencies. By binding grants or award data to primary research objects such as articles, data, or software, the proposed research represents an important step toward data analytics on researcher and university productivity and collaboration. The proposed work has the potential to positively impact every university that receives federal funding and every federal funding agency with a public access compliance policy. An early implementation of the PI's Public Access Submission System (PASS) system has been shown to work with the NIH PubMed Central. But scaling beyond PubMedCentral requires exploratory research such as to establish the logic for simultaneous submission of a publication to multiple federal grant repositories and institution repositories. Research questions include how a third-party applications such as the PASS system, manage cross-institutional grants data, identities, and deposit workflows. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.