Open Data Program

NIST research generates many outputs, including narrative publications, data, code, and software products. SPO coordinates Open Data Program activities across the NIST Laboratories, Office of Data and Informatics, Office of Information Systems Management, and NIST Research Library to make these resources widely available.

The Open Data Program advances the NIST mission by providing a framework, infrastructure, and tools to make NIST data, software, and publications findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable by businesses, researchers, other stakeholders, and the public. This includes a comprehensive inventory of NIST data, software, and narrative publications, repositories/portals providing public access to curated data and software, shared infrastructure to support data transfer and storage in the cloud, and collaboration tools for sharing information with internal and external collaborators.

The number of data files in NIST’s public repository grew by an order of magnitude last year – from 2,000 in January 2020 to nearly 20,000 in January 2021. These data files are organized into nearly 600 data sets. This data has been accessed by users from the United States and 143 other countries around the world.  

NIST partners with NIH to use the Pub Med Central (PMC) repository system to provide public access to full-text peer-reviewed scholarly publications authored by NIST staff, leveraging the well-established search, archival, and dissemination features of PMC. NIST Technical Series publications are available through the Government Publishing Office’s govinfo. NIST also has a participation agreement with CHORUS, facilitating access to publication metrics for NIST and awardee-authored publications. NIST research data is accessible through links on data.gov and through the NIST data portal. Software produced by NIST for research purposes is inventoried and accessible through our data infrastructure, and open-source code is now also discoverable through a new NIST code portal.