Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog

Using Behavioral Science Insights to Make Government More Effective, Simpler, and More People-Friendly

“It makes sense for us to be able to redesign government so that it can deliver on the functions that the American people are looking for. We should all want a government that’s smarter, quicker, and more responsive to the needs of the American people.”

-President Obama, July 8, 2013

This month marks one full year since the launch of the first-ever Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST), which was created in response to the President’s call to make government programs more effective and efficient. SBST comprises leading experts who have been recruited into government to harness behavioral science insights to help Federal government programs better serve the nation while saving taxpayer dollars.

Members of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team visit the Oval Office to brief the President on their work.

SBST had a successful first year, launching a wide variety of evidence-based pilots with objectives ranging from connecting veterans with employment and educational counseling benefits to helping struggling student borrowers understand their loan repayment options.

In one recent pilot, SBST collaborated with the Department of Defense (DOD) to help members of the Armed Forces continue contributions to their Roth Thrift Savings Plans. Due to a change in the military pay system in January 2015, nearly 140,000 members needed to re-enroll in their plans online, or else their contributions would be suspended indefinitely. SBST worked with DOD to redesign their planned communications to better serve our service members, by making the language clear and concise, charting out clear action steps for service members to take, and personalizing the emails.

Results from the first week of the pilot indicated that the redesigned email led 22% more service members – 3,770 individuals – to re-enroll compared to the original message. Since the redesigned email was more effective at prompting re-enrollment after just one week, DOD sent a version of the redesigned email to the entire population in follow-up messages, demonstrating the rapid scalability of insights from these types of low-cost pilots.

The President’s FY 2016 Budget, which was announced earlier this week, supports funds for an expansion of SBST. To mark the one-year anniversary of SBST, the team met with President Obama last Friday.

We would love to hear your ideas for other issues SBST could address to help the government better serve the American people. Also, let us know if you’re interested in joining the effort. Send us your thoughts at sbst@gsa.gov.

Maya Shankar is Senior Advisor for Social and Behavioral Sciences at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

It's Time to Open Materials Science Data

In 2011 President Obama launched the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), committing the nation to discover, develop, and deploy cutting-edge materials twice as fast and at a fraction of the cost at that time. Almost four years later, the MGI is a far-reaching endeavor with over $400 million committed to help support over 500 research scientists and activities to accelerate the development of advanced materials.

A key element of the MGI is ensuring open access to and innovative uses of materials-science data. The materials-research community has taken a number of initial steps to achieve this vision, including the release of an OSTP-, NSF-, and NIST-supported MGI Combinatorial Report advocating for new tool sets that would open up a much larger scale of materials property data than is available today, and the first ever materials hackathon – organized by Citrine and hosted by the Materials Research Society – showcasing the tremendous opportunities to innovate with open data. Federal agencies have also stepped up to support new data repositories for the materials community, including the Materials Project for novel batteries, DOE’s hydrogen storage materials database, and the AFLOWLIB.org repository for quantum materials.

These are important first steps in shifting the conversation from whether data should be shared to how data will be shared. But more must be done to make materials science data openly available as fuel for innovation, growth, and discoveries. The Federal government is stepping up to this challenge, and has been working with agencies across government to finalize plans to increase public access to the results of Federally funded research, including both scientific publications and research data, across the broad range of scientific disciplines – including materials science.  In a recent report to Congress, OSTP Director John P. Holdren explained the Administration’s position, stating: “That data underlying scientific publications are not available for confirmatory analysis, reuse, and repurposing is an anachronism that we aim to address.” In essence, policy is being used as a tool to drive the conversation on what the materials community needs in terms of infrastructure and standards for data sharing. OSTP is encouraged to see such steps starting to happen.

Recently, several scientific journals have stepped up and announced actions to further increase access to the data underlying the conclusions in peer-reviewed scientific publications, including:

• Earlier this week, thirteen advanced material journals, including: Acta Biomaterialia, Acta Materialia, CALPHAD, Composites Part A, Computational Materials Science, Construction and Building Materials, Materials Discovery, Materials Science & Engineering A, Materials Science & Engineering B, Materials Science & Engineering C, Polymer, Scripta Materialia, and Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells announced that they will enable new data services for their contributing authors. This includes submission of data points which turn into interactive graphs, the ability to share data sets alongside their articles using a tool called Open Data, and the ability to submit a microarticle that describes data associated with their article. In 2014, the participating journals published 7500 articles, authored by tens of thousands of researchers based in over 95 countries.
• Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation, published by the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS), is now providing an Open Access platform for the presentation of novel efforts seeking to build an integrated engineering framework to solve a pervasive or recurring need in materials and manufacturing. Datasets submitted in support of articles will be archived at a data repository run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For this journal TMS has also introduced a "Data Descriptor" article type specifically geared to materials data.

Over the course of the coming year Federal agencies will continue work to open access to research data and provide robust solutions to data storage and services.

Cyrus Wadia is Assistant Director for Clean Energy and Materials R&D at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Michael Stebbins is Assistant Director for Biotechnology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.