Regulatory Standards

FRIB has established a Data Management and Sharing Plan to address the regulatory standards pertaining to FRIB’s obligations to comport with

• The Special Terms and Conditions of the Cooperative Agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC) and Michigan State University (MSU) to operate FRIB as a DOE-SC user facility (DE-SC0023633 FA RD Special TC FEB 2026), and the
• DOE-SC user facility policy, and the
• DOE Public Access Plan (June 2023), and the
• DOE Requirements and Guidance for Digital Research Data Management (2025)

Scope of the FRIB Data Management and Sharing Plan

Experiments subject to the FRIB Data Management and Sharing Plan are non-proprietary experiments approved by the Laboratory Director that are either discretionary or were proposed to and recommended for beam-time allocation by the FRIB Program Advisory Committee (PAC) for execution at FRIB.  Proprietary experiments are not subject to the FRIB Data Management and Sharing Plan as “full cost recovery is required for proprietary work.”

Elements of the FRIB Data Management and Sharing Plan

The FRIB Data Management and Sharing Plan contains the following elements:

1. Data types and sources, content and format, sharing and preservation, protection, and rationale;
2. How data sharing and preservation will enable validation of the results from the proposed work, or how results could be validated if data are not shared or preserved;
3. A plan for making all research data displayed in publications resulting from the proposed work digitally accessible at the time of publication;
4. Available information about data management resources to be used in the course of the proposed research work;
5. Protection for confidentiality, personal privacy, Personally Identifiable Information, and U.S. national, homeland, and economic security;
6. Commitment by the Experiment Co-Spokespersons to make all scientific data displayed in peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from non-proprietary FRIB experiments open, allowing validation and replication of results.

Preferred implementation of the FRIB Data Management and Sharing Plan

As a condition of being granted beam time to conduct non-proprietary research at FRIB, users are required

A. To have in place an FRIB-approved Data Management and Sharing Implementation Plan, or

B. To agree to the following implementation steps:

1. To comply with the principles of “Validation and replication of results” and “Timely and fair access”, Co-Spokespersons of approved non-proprietary experiments at FRIB must certify upon accepting the beam time and reaffirm annually:
   1. All scientific data displayed in peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from the FRIB experiments will be made available openly, machine-readable, and digitally accessible to the public at the time of publication. Upon publication, the Co-Spokespersons will provide a link to the repository of their choice for FRIB’s records.
   2. While FRIB preserves the primary (raw) data and metadata as specified by the Co-Spokespersons for five years, it is the Co-Spokespersons’ responsibility to maintain any related tools, software, or code used during the research work that obtained the published results. After five years of FRIB maintaining the primary data, it becomes the responsibility of the Co-Spokespersons to preserve and share the experiment data following the principle of “Timely and fair access”.
   3. The Co-Spokespersons commit to ensure that publications from FRIB experiments are submitted to ELink.