2023 is the year of the rabbit in the Chinese Lunar calendar, the year Voyager 2 is predicted to overtake Pioneer 10 as the second-farthest spacecraft from Earth, and the Year of Open Science. In an announcement by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), 2023 was declared the Year of Open…

Image by Ilya Pavlov, CC0. Last week the White House finalized the Federal Source Code Policy to improve access to software code developed by or for the federal government. The policy is a step in the right direction toward making software accessible and reusable across U.S. government agencies, as well as for the general public.…

Photo by Tirza van Dijk, CC0. A few weeks ago we submitted comments to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) draft federal source code policy. The purpose of the policy is to improve access to custom software code developed for the federal government, and would require that: (1) New custom code whose development is…

Today the White House released the U.S. Open Data Action Plan, reaffirming their belief that “freely available data from the U.S. Government is an important national resource… [and] making information about government operations more readily available and useful is also core to the promise of a more efficient and transparent government.” The report (PDF) outlines…