The NASA Plan for Increasing Access to the Results of Scientific Research mandates that “... all scientific information produced from SMD-funded scientific research activities should be made publicly available and preserved, without fee or restriction of use, in machine-readable formats, with robust and standards-compliant metadata, to ensure their long-term accessibility and reusability, while enabling reproducibility of the research.” To help fulfill this mandate, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) has created a guiding document, SPD-41: Scientific Information policy for the Science Mission Directorate.

Additionally, the NASA Guidebook for Proposers describes the requirement for all proposals submitted to competed funding opportunities such as elements of the ROSES program, to include a Data Management Plan (DMP) with the proposal.

If you intend to use AHED as repository to archive your astrobiology data in proposed research and you need a Letter of Support for your DMP, please contact us using our Contact form. Please include “DMP letter support” in the subject and the following information in the message content:

• Name of Principal Investigator (PI):
• Email of PI:
• Funding program and year:
• Title of proposal:
• List of data products to be archived:
• Rough estimate of total data size:
• Date by which letter is needed:

The AHED team will review the request and contact you if more information is required. Please contact us at least a week before your deadline to make sure we can provide timely support.

Other repositories:

Depending on your data, you could also consider using other repositories for your DMP:

• Zenodo is recommended for archiving software. Although you can use AHED to also archive your software, Zenodo is specifically targeted for software and provides more guidance on license selection. If you use Zenodo for your software, don’t forget to include the link to the Zenodo dataset (URL or DOI) in your AHED dataset!
• Planetary Data Systems (PDS) is NASA’s Defacto archive for planetary science data. It has traditionally focused on data from NASA missions, higher order data products derived from those primary mission data, as well as ground-based observations. The PDS employs rigorous standards in terms of file types and metadata accompanying archived data products, which involves a review process. This typically requires data providers to coordinate and work with PDS staff. If you produce a PDS archive but want to augment the data or just make it more visible you can provide a link to your PDS archive in an AHED dataset.