Institute for Telecommunication Sciences / About ITS / Scientific Integrity and Open Access
Scientific Integrity, Intellectual Property, and Open Access
Scientific Integrity
As a federally funded research and development laboratory, the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences adopts the Federal Definition of Scientific Integrity developed and agreed upon by the National Science and Technology Council 2022 Scientific Integrity Framework Interagency Working Group and the 2021 Scientific Integrity Fast Track Action Committee:
Scientific integrity is the adherence to professional practices, ethical behavior, and the principles of honesty and objectivity when conducting, managing, using the results of, and communicating about science and scientific activities. Inclusivity, transparency, and protection from inappropriate influence are hallmarks of scientific integrity.
NTIA's Guidelines for Ensuring and Maximizing the Quality, Objectivity, Utility, and Integrity of Information outline in broad strokes the pre-dissemination peer review process for scientific documents originating from and disseminated by ITS. ITS is committed to ensuring that our publications are substantive, technically sound, accurate, and clear. A rigorous peer review process, documented in the “ITS Publications Handbook Volume I: Policies (Third Edition),” safeguards the scientific integrity of ITS technical reports, journal articles, and conference papers. The principles outlined therein also guide parallel peer review processes for the publication of software and datasets.
Copyright and Intellectual Property
Most text on ITS web pages and most documents accessed through our web pages were either prepared by employees of the U.S. Government as part of their official duties or prepared under contracts that gave ITS the right to place the text into the public domain. Works of the U.S. Government—those prepared by its officers and employees as part of their official duties—are by law in the public domain. You may freely copy that material, but we require that you credit ITS as the source.
Within the ITS Web site, however, you may find individual documents, illustrations, photographs, or other information resources contributed or licensed by private individuals, companies, or organizations that may be protected by U.S. and foreign copyright laws. Any copyrighted material included in our work by permission of the original copyright holders (as sometimes occurs with jointly published research) remains the property of those copyright holders. It does not enter into the public domain because it is included by permission in a U.S. Government work. If a report contains such material, it will be indicated in a preface or disclaimer at the beginning of the report; if copyrighted material is included on an ITS web page, notice will be given on the relevant Web page. Transmission or reproduction of protected items beyond that allowed by fair use as defined in the copyright laws requires the written permission of the copyright owners.
Open Access
It is a longstanding policy at ITS to strive to make freely available to the public, in publicly accessible repositories, all peer-reviewed scholarly publications—manuscripts, software, and datasets—arising from unclassified research and programs funded wholly or in part by the federal government. By default, Principal Investigators are expected to make the results and accomplishments of their activities available to the research community and to the public at large.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) 2022 memorandum Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research extended to smaller laboratories like ITS a formal list of specific requirements designed to ensure effective open access to all peer-reviewed scholarly publications, scientific software, and digital scientific data produced by federally funded laboratories for use in research, development, education, and scientific discovery.
The NTIA ITS Public Access Plan for Open Science documents ITS's plan to enhance our current capabilities in order to improve delivery of transparent, open, secure, and free communication of federally funded research and activities in an expeditious manner, compliant with the specific requirements of the OSTP memorandum.