Center for Open Science Awarded Grant from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to Preserve and Safeguard Publicly Funded Scientific Data

Media Contact: pr@cos.io

The Center for Open Science (COS) has been awarded a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to develop a community-driven strategic plan for ensuring the long-term preservation, accessibility, and usability of federally-funded scientific data.

COS has long championed policies and practices that increase the openness, integrity, and trustworthiness of research. The success of the open science movement relies on the integrity, sustainability, and resilience of infrastructures that promote access to research outputs, like scientific data. In 2025, the sudden removal of public data from multiple federal agency websites underscored the urgent need for sustainable systems to safeguard and maintain public access to scientific data generated by federally funded researchers.

The RWJF-funded project, Ensuring the Preservation, Accessibility, and Usability of Public Data, will be led by COS, with co-direction from a stakeholder planning committee composed of leaders from across the research and scientific data communities.

Planning committee members are Maria Gould (DataCite), Joel Gurin (CODE), Robert Hanisch (Campostella Research and Consulting), Kristi Holmes (Northwestern University), Lynda Kellam (University of Pennsylvania, Data Rescue Project), Christine Kirkpatrick (San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego, GO FAIR US), Chris Marcum (Data Foundation), Mark Parsons (ESIP), and Katherine Skinner (IOI). Alex Wade is serving as the project’s lead consultant.

The project aims to complement and coordinate with existing community-driven initiatives—including the Internet Archive, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and the Data Rescue Project—by developing a framework for long-term stewardship of federally-funded data. The resulting strategic plan will guide how the research community monitors, preserves, and sustains access to at-risk datasets and repositories.

Areas for initial focus and exploration include:

• Monitoring at-risk repositories: Clarifying methods for identifying repositories that may face data loss due to funding, staffing, or policy changes.
  
  
• Ensuring FAIRness and resilience of preserved datasets: Establishing processes and building capacity to promote the FAIRness (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) and resilience of preserved datasets and associated tools to support their continued discoverability and use in a distributed data ecosystem.
  
  
• Dashboard for data health: Creating a shared framework to inform decision making that data stewards and communities can use to score and monitor data health across multiple dimensions, including preservation, resilience, FAIRness, usability and utility for different audiences, and availability of interactive tools.
  
  
• Building governance and sustainability: Outlining models for coordinated community action, avoiding duplication of effort, defining best practices for preservation, and ensuring sustained stewardship of preserved data.
  
  
• Developing an outreach and advocacy framework: Raising awareness and catalyzing action among researchers, funders, policymakers, and the broader public about the importance and vulnerability of public data and associated infrastructures, including guidance on accessing preserved datasets, reporting at-risk resources, and ways to support and advocate for more sustainable and resilient infrastructures.
  
  “Together with our expert strategic planning partners, COS is committed to meeting the moment to promote the resilience of the scientific data system. We’re looking forward to continuing to build on the great progress we’ve made to promote greater openness, transparency, and integrity to ensure science continues to serve the public good,” said project co-lead Maryam Zaringhalam, PhD, COS Senior Director of Policy.
  
  The project will run through September 2026. Insights generated during the planning process will also inform COS’s own data infrastructure work through the Open Science Framework (OSF) and related advocacy efforts that support transparency and sustainable data management.
  
  For more information about the project or to get involved, visit the Ensuring the Preservation, Accessibility, and Usability of Public Data webpage.
  
  ###
  
  About COS
  
  Founded in 2013, COS is a nonprofit culture change organization with a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. COS pursues this mission by building communities around open science practices, supporting metascience research, and developing and maintaining free, open source software tools, including the Open Science Framework (OSF).