Communicating Science and Engineering Data in the Information Age (2012) / Chapter Skim
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1 The Changing Data Dissemination Landscape
1 The Changing Data Dissemination Landscape
Pages 7-18
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From page 7... ...
In this chapter, we discuss how strong forces are driving changing expectations on the part of users of S&E resource and workforce data, as well as how technology and a changing policy and analytical environment in the federal government are forcing NSF to rethink and modernize the manner in which NCSES communicates information to the public. To help understand how NCSES can respond to the driving forces that we document, we also discuss the environment that it faces and that faces federal statistical agencies in general.
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From page 8... ...
. The 2010 follow-up report to the Gathering Storm report further concluded that "substantial evidence continues to indicate that over the long term the great majority of newly created jobs are the indirect or direct result of advancements in science and technology, thus making these and related disciplines assume what might be described as disproportionate importance" (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, 2010, p.
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From page 9... ...
economy relative to other countries that compete economically with it; coming to grips with regional issues that influence the economic competitiveness and innovation capacity of the United States; and evaluating the effectiveness of the federal government in supporting and promoting economic competitiveness and innovation. All of these initiatives require access to the kind of information that NCSES produces in its data collections.
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From page 10... ...
The program will have two phases. The first phase will use university administrative records to calculate the employment impact of federal science spending through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and agencies' existing budgets.
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From page 11... ...
. The initial R&D Dashboard website presents data on federal R&D awards to research institutions and links those inputs to outputs -- specifically publications, patent applications, and patents produced by researchers funded by those investments -- from two agencies over the decade from 2000 to 2009: NIH and NSF play a significant role in funding basic research in the United States; more than 80 percent of the federal government's support of university-based research, for example, comes from these two agencies.
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From page 12... ...
Now there are a multitude of choices among electronic means of retrieving reports and data elements -- the most prominent of these choices for the federal statistical agencies today are FedStats and Data.gov, which are discussed in Chapter 2. From a handful of interconnected government and university research computers, the Internet has grown to near ubiquity, and today's users search the web for more information than was available in the past.3 Moreover, with the increased availability of broadband and high-speed Internet access, dynamic, multimedia-laden websites are replacing formerly static web pages, with the consequence that users have the expectation of being able to interact with the information for which they are searching.
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From page 13... ...
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT DATA DISSEMINATION POLICIES As a federal statistical agency, NCSES operates within a set of OMB guidelines that cover a wide variety of statistical practices, from survey design to data collection to dissemination. The federal government's policies regarding dissemination of information to the public are promulgated by OMB under the authority of the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA)
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From page 14... ...
The NSF guidelines require review of ongoing publication series and other information products on a regular basis to ensure that they remain relevant and address current information needs. Integrity guidelines cover aspects of the security of information from
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From page 15... ...
, in that all original and supporting data sources used in producing statistical data products should be clearly identified and documented, either in the publication or on each individual table. The metadata will generally include specification of variables used, definitions of variables when appropriate, coverage or population issues, sampling errors, disclosure avoidance rules or techniques, confidentiality constraints, and data collection techniques.
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From page 16... ...
Elements of an effective dissemination program include the following: • An established publications policy that describes, for a data col lection program, the types of reports and other data releases to be made available, the audience to be served, and the frequency of release. • A variety of avenues for data dissemination, chosen to reach as broad a public as reasonably possible.
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From page 17... ...
17 THE CHANGING DATA DISSEMINATION LANDSCAPE the statistical agency, and the agency or unit that produces the data should publish in advance and meet release schedules for impor tant indicators to prevent even the appearance of manipulation of release dates for political purposes. • Policies for the preservation of data that guide what data to retain and how they are to be archived for future secondary analysis.
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