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Open Science, Missions, Observatories, NASA, Heliophysics, Earth Science, Planetary Science
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Ringuette R, Barnum J, Bishop R et al. Open Science for Missions and Observatories: Practical Choices to Shape Your Observing Adventure [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]. F1000Research 2026, 15:1059 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.183314.1)
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Open Science for Missions and Observatories: Practical Choices to Shape Your Observing Adventure
[version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]
PUBLISHED 02 Jul 2026
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This article is included in the Research on Research, Policy & Culture gateway.
Abstract
Corresponding author:
Rebecca Ringuette
Competing interests:
No competing interests were disclosed.
Grant information:
The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work. Work done by staff of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, was performed under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004).
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Copyright:
© 2026 Ringuette R et al.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
How to cite: Ringuette R, Barnum J, Bishop R et al. Open Science for Missions and Observatories: Practical Choices to Shape Your Observing Adventure [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]. F1000Research 2026, 15:1059 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.183314.1)
First published: 02 Jul 2026, 15:1059 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.183314.1)
Latest published: 02 Jul 2026, 15:1059 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.183314.1)
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Introduction
What is open science?
According to the U.S.A. White House of 2022, “Open Science is the principle and practice of making research products and processes available to all, while respecting diverse cultures, maintaining security and privacy, and fostering collaborations, reproducibility and equity”.1 There are several definitions for Open Science internationally, such as the multi-faceted work put forth by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO 2022) and the statements produced by various countries and agencies. More recent statements from the USA White House of 2025 concerning “Gold-Standard Science”2 describe ideas similar to the current NASA definition,3 including collaboration, reproducibility, and transparency. The trend in all of these definitions is the same - an agreed focus to reduce and ideally remove barriers between the community and the structure of science, including the research products of interest, the processes that create them, and the knowledge gained. Expanding collaboration beyond previously accepted boundaries, openly sharing the various resources used to produce a given result, and improving the quality of those resources to increase community trust with scientists, taxpayers, decision-makers and others are all goals represented in these policies with the aim to clearly communicate and support the amazing science based on the observations generated by missions and observatories.
Open Science brings with it a promise to accelerate our understanding of the physical world through increased collaboration and transparency. It portrays a bright future where revolutionary scientific advances are achieved through completely open collaboration, computationally reproducible science, and a high level of transparency that beckons the imagination forward. However, we must recognize that the application of Open Science to a given area is not a Midas Touch that magically solves a given challenge. Scientists still need funding, competition has real consequences, security concerns and resource misuse can cause significant risk, and people generally resist change, whether based on an unfavorable mental state or simply a lack of time. Open Science is hard for many reasons, but we are already beginning to see the benefits. This paper aims to show simple yet innovative ways to apply the concepts of Open Science to missions in practical ways and thereby broaden our understanding of Open Science.
Why should a mission or observatory incorporate open science?
We now find ourselves in a quickly changing landscape of cultural norms, policy requirements, and infrastructural capability, particularly regarding the openness expected of the data, software, and other artifacts our missions produce. As the complexity of our work increases, the demands of our peers also increases. The broad public and scientific interest in the reproducibility crises (e.g., The Open Science Collaboration, 2015, and the mention in the May 2025 Gold Standard White House executive order)2 has promoted a healthy interest in understanding more of the details of how a product or result was achieved. Whereas in the past it was generally acceptable for a publication to have little support for a conclusion beyond equations, plots, and some associated text, the current cultural standard increasingly demands the entire workflow, including version-specific citations of the originating datasets and the exact software used to produce the final results from those data.4 There is now a recognition that we as the science community can and should do more to share how the product or result was obtained, and that the increase in openness is a desirable change, leading to changes in what is required for professional scholarship.
This change in culture has in turn triggered changes in policy towards requiring more open publications and data, and recently software, gradually increasing the level of openness required in the scientific communities.5,6,7 The simultaneous advances in technology have also allowed tasks that were typically only shared within a research or mission team to transform into a new more broadly sharable workflow built on infrastructure and software more complex than most could have previously imagined. These advances have made sharing data and software a much easier task than before, likely contributing to the shift in culture towards sharing these resources. As the implementation of scientific research takes advantage of new opportunities afforded by technological advancements, including in artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts, each scientific effort must choose their unique path forward based on their own resources and capabilities.
For missions and observatories, the motivations for incorporating Open Science are numerous, where missions are typically space-based observing efforts, including rockets, cubesats and balloons, and observatories are typically ground-based observing efforts. In our current funding landscape, mission proposals are now reviewed for the Open Science practices in addition to the science impact and technical feasibility. Instead of thinking of this new component as yet another box to check, missions can use these additional proposal components to incorporate Open Science practices chosen to build on the unique structure of that mission in a way that benefits the community. Not every mission can accomplish the same picture of Open Science since each faces differing restrictions, but every mission can choose to incorporate Open Science practices. The uniqueness of the practices chosen for a particular mission gives that mission a competitive edge that helps level the playing field across budgets, resources, and capabilities.
The benefits of incorporating Open Science practices into a mission go far beyond proposal competitiveness. Openly sharing various mission products throughout their development, such as software and data, and the processes used to achieve the science has at least two strong benefits for a mission. It builds public trust in, credibility and ownership of the mission’s results, and it tells the story of the mission to the wider community. A mission can build trust with the public by pursuing open processes in generating the science results of the mission, ideally including replication of those results. Increasing interactions with the communities that the mission science affects in some way (e.g., the tourism and electric power industries for auroral prediction) additionally can facilitate a synergy with the public that is difficult to imitate through a closed approach. An important part of those interactions should be to take time to understand the needs of the communities the mission science is intended to benefit and the potential economic impact of those benefits, including negative ones.
This is not to say that missions should allow a chaotic environment that leads to negative consequences. Collaboration rules, code of conduct enforcement, and even DOI assignment to mission products at significant milestones with proper recognition of contributors should be used to guard against negative behaviors and create a structured, open, and welcoming atmosphere. Missions also stand to benefit from the increased collaboration possible in such an atmosphere, specifically improvements to their data and software products, and advances in their mission science. A mission that provides significant utility for the research community catches the heart of the wider community is more likely to obtain funding at future stages since the public opinion is in their favor (e.g., the Hubble Space Telescope).
NASA’s SPD-41a: The starting line for missions
The requirements detailed in NASA’s new SPD-41a policy provide an official “starting line” for NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD)-funded science missions on their journey towards incorporating Open Science practices.8 For missions in a stage earlier than the Key Decision Point-B9 (KDP-B) milestone as of Mar 2, 2023, new requirements (SHALLs) and recommendations (SHOULDs) now apply to the characteristics of scientific information produced by missions. For missions that were at a later KDP milestone on that date, all requirements in the policy become a “SHOULD”, with those later missions being encouraged to adopt them as possible given their available resources, potentially with supplemental funding. Some later missions have successfully incorporated some Open Science practices, with the James Webb Space Telescope as one of several examples making their data public.
This policy updates the previous version, SPD-41, which consolidated several pre-existing NASA and federal requirements that previously applied to these missions, including requirements from the US Office of Science and Technology Policy for federally funded research and development concerning open publications and open data (the Holden memo in 2013). Given these previous policies requiring open publications and open data and the release of the Nelson memo in 2022 removing embargos and delays on those items, it is not surprising for publications and data to be included as artifact types within SPD-41a’s scope. However, SPD-41a takes openness a step further by including scientific software within its scope, specifically software that provides users some degree of scientific utility or service. This is a significant and timely push to increase the transparency and credibility of the science results produced by NASA-funded missions, especially since software is increasingly critical in forming our scientific understanding. With SPD-41a, NASA is pushing forward by not only incorporating open software into official policy, but also by including some specific requirements and best practices in that policy regarding open source software and its development.
For missions, the requirements in SPD-41a form a starting line in their journey towards incorporating Open Science practices. These requirements focus on the main three types of artifacts produced by missions: publications, data, and software (see the full policy for details). Publications are required to be made publicly accessible in NASA’s publication repository and made freely available without embargo or delay after the publication date. These publications are to include those that describe the mission, such as technical reports, peer-reviewed publications, conference proceedings, and so on.
Data supporting those publications and other data products from missions are required to be made similarly freely and publicly available. As part of the move towards more transparency, the new policy encourages delivery of software and data in a continuous and ongoing manner, as opposed to once at the end of mission. Requirements ask missions to consider file formats, the associated license, their findability, accompanying metadata, NASA specific indexing, and citability with a persistent identifier. Types of data and ancillary products include observations, calibrations, documentation, and other information produced by the missions. Although previous policies allowed for periods of exclusive access to mission data for mission scientists, SPD-41a does not, other than a maximum of 6 months for calibration, validation, and similar activities.
The requirements for unrestricted public software developed with NASA SMD funds push into a new territory of openness and transparency. Software projects are required to include a code of conduct, contribution guidelines, appropriate license, be available in a publicly accessible repository (e.g. GitHub or similar), indexed in NASA’s software catalog, be citable with a persistent identifier, have a software management plan, and be developed openly on a publicly accessible version-controlled platform that allows for contributions and engagement from the community. Details on the release method and pathway are also included in these requirements.
Beyond these requirements, SPD-41a also includes recommendations (SHOULDs) on other characteristics to prioritize for these artifacts. There are no SHOULDs for publications in SPD-41a, but acquiring a persistent identifier for each article is now common practice. One significant recommendation in SPD-41a is that mission data should be FAIR,10 which is a complex pursuit in itself. One great way to satisfy this recommendation is to archive the data at a NASA SMD repository in the science division most closely related to the mission science in alignment with a collaboratively chosen level of service for each mission data product. In some cases, data archival at these repositories has been possible even for mission data produced by non-NASA missions. Other recommendations for mission data include a preference for the CC0 license for data and encouraging users to cite the datasets in their publications. SPD-41a lists only one recommendation for software: following best practices for open source software development and other best practices available in their associated research communities, such as science-specific or functionality-specific (e.g., analysis pipelines vs. modeling) communities of practice incorporating multiple science divisions.
One consequence of these requirements and recommendations is a change in how missions compete for funding in the new landscape produced by SPD-41a and the maturing Open Science culture. Previously, proposals were reviewed in a way that prioritized peer-reviewed publications. In that culture, the data and software used to produce those publications were treated as the ‘secret sauce’ in a research group, improving the likelihood of future publications building on that work and decreasing the probability of others publishing similar work. This approach also prevented collaboration across missions and significantly hindered reproducibility and transparency. Over time, missions in the various science disciplines have shifted towards more open data and software to varying degrees in each discipline, in many cases without the prodding provided by a policy requirement. The embargoes on mission data, including the science data, possible under previous policies upheld those traditions to some extent, and mission-developed software was often still difficult to gain access to, again, more so in some disciplines than others. However, the openness now required of missions and researchers combined with the newly equalized importance of publications, data, and software in proposal reviews (see III. J of the SPD-41a policy) provide increased alignment with today’s more open culture, even prodding that culture forward. The larger the shift in a given discipline, the more difficult it may be for missions in that discipline to effectively compete for funding by incorporating Open Science practices. This work aims to further level the competition by introducing new ideas for missions to choose from to improve their Open Science practices, and therefore how competitive they are in their proposals. Work remains to be done to develop a funding structure with improved support of a more open and collaborative culture (Ringuette et al. 2024).
Finding your mission’s place on the spectrum
Competition in this new landscape has become a tension between prioritizing openness and collaboration pitched against the very real consequences of limited costs, tight schedules, data privacy requirements, technical constraints, and other hindrances. The expertise of the institutions supporting a given mission varies in much the same way as before, perhaps now more widely so, but now a second spread of capability is at play in the proposal selection process - the capability of the mission to include and support Open Science practices. In some cases, it may appear that this inclusion makes it more difficult for a given mission to be selected. However, this same new component can be used in the mission’s favor even when it is not possible to fulfill the minimum requirements of SPD-41a due to various restrictions such as international agreements preventing an open license for an artifact. We must simply look beyond the traditional perspective of mission products, even those mentioned in SPD-41a, for opportunities to enhance the mission’s contribution to the community and thus increase the competitiveness of that mission’s proposal. Open Science is not a binary choice - there is a spectrum of possibilities and opportunities for each aspect of the mission.
The challenges of running a science-oriented mission or observatory are in many cases similar in ways relevant to the data, software, publications, and people that are part of that effort. Both require observation planning, command and control of at least one observational apparatus, producing data for community use using software, analyzing those data using software, producing publications using those data and software, having people working on these components, and competing for funding. These components stretch across mission and observatory scales, despite their differences, including scientific ballooning and rockets to large multi-year missions and observatories. The differences across the scale of efforts can in some ways make the tasks presented in the Appendix more challenging for larger efforts despite the typically larger funding, but in other ways simpler, and in ways that vary across missions and observatories of similar sizes. The opposite is also true: smaller efforts such as balloons and rockets will find some of the Open Science tasks provided below easier to include as compared to larger efforts. We invite missions and observatories of all sizes to choose what best benefits their observational efforts, and keep in mind how these may highlight their own uniqueness.
The Appendix presents a wealth of potential tasks to incorporate Open Science practices into a mission’s activities. These activities are roughly divided into three mission phases - the pre-proposal phase, the development phase, and the post-launch phase - with further divisions into culture and artifact related tasks. The list of tasks in a given mission phase does not repeat those listed in earlier phases even though the earlier tasks may still be relevant, and missions can choose to complete a given task related to any mission phase regardless of the current mission status. For example, the task “create a PID (Persistent IDentifier) for the mission” is listed in the pre-launch phase, but it could be completed in the post-launch phase if not completed earlier or even in the pre-proposal phase if so desired. The motivation for including each task is included, along with a starting point on how to complete that task.
We offer these tasks to the observing community as a resource to help missions and observatories become more competitive by incorporating Open Science activities into their plans. A single mission is not expected to incorporate all of the tasks in these sections. Some tasks will be more relevant for one mission than another, some will only be feasible for larger missions or budgets, and others may be easier for smaller missions. However, incorporating even a small selection of these tasks into the Open Science Data Management Plan (OSDMP)11 for the mission will make that mission more competitive by enhancing the mission culture, advancing the mission science, supplementing the mission’s openness when restrictions prevent in other areas, and building public trust in and ownership of the mission results. Now to choose your mission’s adventure, please consult the descriptions and motivations for each activity in the Appendix for options that are appealing to you.
Summary
Incorporating Open Science activities into a mission provides several benefits:
• Improved accessibility for the mission staff and products,
• Increased efficiency and innovation for the development of the mission components,
• More trustworthy and reproducible mission results, and
• Accelerated advances and increased community ownership resulting from including more of the community in the mission work.
These activities are not only centered around the mission artifacts as typically assumed, but also around the mission culture.
The proposal process for missions now includes open science activities at several US agencies, including NASA via the Open Science Data Management Plan (OSDMP). This paper has presented the motivation and explanation to help missions select open science activities to add to their OSDMP or similar document to make their mission proposals more competitive, even if their ability to comply with some open science practices are hindered.
A substantive list of Open Science activities are included in the appendix archived separately on Zenodo, categorized by the mission phase and the type of activity (Ringuette et al. 2026). The unique characteristic of these activities is that they include several atypical open science activities in the mission artifacts categories and even a separate category in each mission phase for open science activities related to the mission culture. This list is just the beginning. We invite missions and observatories to use this list as a way to start incorporating Open Science practices and contribute back with additional ideas.
Our understanding of how to apply the principles of open science to missions will mature in the coming decades in ways we cannot yet imagine, but we can guide our imagination with a few simple questions:
• Is there an easy way to collaborate more openly on this task?
• Can I design what I’m working on in a way that others could use pieces of my work?
• In what new way can I offer the experience embodied in this mission to the community?
We invite the mission community to use this publication as a reference and a resource by selecting from these activities and others they may think of to improve their mission proposal competitiveness and to improve how their mission is regarded by the science community.
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how to cite this article
Ringuette R, Barnum J, Bishop R et al. Open Science for Missions and Observatories: Practical Choices to Shape Your Observing Adventure [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]. F1000Research 2026, 15:1059 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.183314.1)
NOTE: If applicable, it is important to ensure the information in square brackets after the title is included in all citations of this article.
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