Fostering Open Science through Public-Private Partnerships

Collaborations are a key component for fostering open science. To fully leverage advances in research technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, public-partnerships are needed. The lack of formal collaboration mechanisms often hinders open knowledge transfer between government agencies and private industries. NASA's Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team (IMPACT) seeks to address these challenges by establishing NASA Space Act Agreements as non-reimbursable research partnerships with the private sector. The purpose of these agreements is to advance open science and enable discovery, access, and use of high value NASA science data sets on the cloud.

One example of this partnership is with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Sustainability Initiative and AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program. This partnership has supported training workshops and hackathons for the Earth science community to help researchers effectively utilize their data on the cloud. This partnership has also enabled the sharing of selected NASA science data on AWS's Registry of Open Data to demonstrate the value of co-locating data sets from other collaborating agencies on one platform. In summary, we will present an overview of our current partnerships supporting open science initiatives, describe current activities as well as share lessons learned.