Recommendations and evidence
All 16 Future of Science publications, newest first. Filter by kind or by topic.
Publications
16 publications
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FAS Supports the “Build More Agenda” by the Build America Caucus
FAS is eager to see implementation of metascience to measure what works, promote novel and effective research programs such as the work of the NSF X-Labs program, and create policy that enables the AI-enabled scientific enterprise to…
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The Science of Moonshots: Using Evidence to Design Transformative Initiatives
We’ve identified the key ingredients of successful moonshots that meet the moment, and developed recommendations about what future efforts can and should look like.
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Algae as Analogy in an Age of Disruption and Transition Complexity
Complex systems – from ecological to political to socio-technical – rarely change the way we expect.
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FAS Comment RE: Proposed Rule: Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance (2026-10817)
The provisions in the proposed OMB rule create conflicts with existing federal requirements, remove the documented, reviewable standards that make termination and award decisions accountable, reduce transparency and efficiency across the…
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Research Agenda: Estimating the U.S. Government’s Return-on-Investment on Scientific Research & Development
The United States federal government invests nearly $150 billion annually in research and development. However, the supporting evidence generates wildly different estimates depending on the methods and available data.
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What the Metascience Community Should Learn From the Federal Evidence Movement Before Making Our Mistakes
The emerging federal metascience community is asking fascinating questions that are equally vital for democratic legitimacy: beyond “did this program work” to “how does the federal R&D enterprise itself work, and how could it work better?”
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Kickstarting Collaborative, AI-Ready Datasets in the Life Sciences with Government-funded Projects
The research community lacks strategies to incentivize collaboration on high-quality data acquisition and sharing. The government should fund collaborative roadmapping, certification, collection, and sharing of large, high-quality…
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How to Prompt New Cross-Agency and Cross-Sector Collaboration to Advance Learning Agendas
To improve program outcomes, federal evaluation officers should conduct “unmet desire surveys” to advance federal learning agendas and built agency buy-in.
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Not Accessible: Federal Policies Unnecessarily Complicate Funding to Support Differently Abled Researchers. We Can Change That.
Standardizing support for Accessibility & Accommodations in federally funded research efforts would open opportunities for disabled scientists and their research programs.
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Predicting Progress: A Pilot of Expected Utility Forecasting in Science Funding
Science funding agencies are biased against risk, making transformative research difficult to fund. Forecast-based approaches to grantmaking could improve funding outcomes for high-risk, high-reward research.
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Working with academics: A primer for U.S. government agencies
Collaboration between federal agencies and academic researchers is an important tool for public policy. This primer provides an initial set of questions and topics for agencies to consider when exploring academic partnership.
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Incorporate open science standards into the identification of evidence-based social programs
Federal clearinghouses should incorporate open science practices into their standards and procedures used to identify evidence-based social programs eligible for federal funding.
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Develop a Digital Technology Fund to secure and sustain open source software
To better address security and sustainability of open source software, the United States should establish a Digital Technology Fund through multi-stakeholder participation.
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Advance open science through robust data privacy measures
Building on existing data and privacy efforts, the White House and federal science agencies should collaborate to develop and implement clear standards for research data privacy across the data management and sharing life cycle.
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Incorporate open source hardware into Patent and Trademark Office search locations for prior art
The USPTO should incorporate open source hardware certification databases into the library of resources to search for prior art, and create guidelines and training to build agency capacity for evaluating open source prior art.
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Improve research through better data management and sharing plans
Federal agencies should take coordinated action to ensure that data sharing policies incentivize high-quality data management and sharing plans.
Design note. The topics here are the proposed tidy (see Topics): 21 terms on these publications become eight. That's RFP item D, visible topics, made worth showing, plus the optional bulk tag editing that does the merging.