Sneak Preview: President Signs Data Transparency Legislation

(The following was excerpted from and article in the Federal Grants Management Handbook.) On Jan. 14, the president signed legislation that enacts the Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary [OPEN] Government Data Act, S. 270.

The act is part of a larger piece of legislation, the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking (FEBP) Act (H.R. 4174), which requires most federal departments and agencies to submit to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Congress an annual plan for identifying and addressing policy questions relevant to their programs and regulations. The plan must include questions for developing evidence to support policymaking, and a list of data for facilitating the use of evidence in policymaking. A key sponsor of the act was former Speaker of the House and outgoing member of Congress Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

The OPEN Government Data Act is included as Title 2 of the FEBP Act. The act requires open government data assets to be made published at Data.gov by most federal agencies, including federal grantmaking agencies, as machine-readable data when not otherwise prohibited by law. To the extent appropriate, public data assets and nonpublic data assets maintained by the federal government must be available:

• in an open format that does not impede use or reuse and that has standards maintained by a standards organization; and
• under open licenses with a legal guarantee that the data be available at no cost to the public with no restrictions on copying, publishing, distributing, transmitting, citing or adapting.

The OPEN Government Data Act “builds on President Obama’s May 2013 Open Data Policy. It makes the key aspects of the Open Data Policy permanent,” according to the Data Coalition, which advocates for the open accessibility of government resources. It had bipartisan congressional support. The Data Coalition's Acting Executive Director Sarah Joy Hays said that the FEBP “will transform the way the government collects, publishes and uses nonsensitive public information.”

To further the goal of government transparency, under the OPEN Government Data Act, each federal agency must develop a comprehensive data inventory for all data assets created by or collected by the agency, and designate a chief data officer. The move toward the open publication of federal data sets parallels the push to make research-related publications, data and results publicly accessible on sites such as PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov, and at other federal resources.

(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)

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