Thank you for these questions.
The office has certainly been very busy in the past five years, and certainly in the past two years with the pandemic. However, from the get-go we saw our role as really looking at the horizontal issues, and making recommendations for the enhancement of all the science advice and the science itself. As part of this, I can't say that I did an audit of any particular department. I did visit many labs. I spoke with scientists. We looked into how research and science was being conducted.
That's why one of the first things we did was to introduce the science integrity policy. For those who are not familiar, this is the equivalent, really, of a policy on the responsible conduct of research. That's something that exists in academic institutions. It's actually an obligation of both the institutions and the researchers who receive federal funding to comply with the responsible conduct of our research.
The policy does delineate the role and the responsibility of both the employer and the employee in many ways. It suggests ways to disclose, for example, conflict of interest. It suggests ways by which people can talk about their research, about their science, without undue influence. This was very important.
The second thing we did as a follow-up, of course, to this was to propose a road map for open science. We've all seen during this pandemic the importance of open science, not only for enhancing the trust of the public but also for accelerating innovation, for accelerating the production in this case of diagnostics and preventive measures.
We proposed this road map, and we have worked with departments to achieve it so that the science that is conducted by federal scientists is easily accessible, whether it's in the form of published reports and manuscripts or that of the observational data part as well.