NASA Earth Science Enterprise Data Pricing
Policy to be implemented within EOSDIS (April 6, 2000)
- M. Maiden, NASA Headquarters
- 6 Apr 2000
The ESE has decided to proceed with implementing a cost for
distribution of products at the level of recovering the full marginal
cost, consistent with Circular A-130. By instituting a marginal cost
charging policy, ESE is creating a means of remaining responsive to
new and real increasing demand without incurring further burden on
the US taxpayer. NASA has officially submitted language for our 2001
authorization bill to enable us to retain receipts from recovering
user charges.
This interpretation of our OMB guidelines and ESE Data Policy is
consistent with changes in Enterprise direction over the last several
years. The Earth Science Enterprise has broadened its mandate beyond
our scientific goal of examining and modeling the Earth system to answer
scientific questions of great societal importance, to include a stated
goal of expanding and accelerating realization of national economic and
societal benefits from Earth science, technology & information. This goal
reemphasizes the importance of broad, and broadening, dissemination of
our ESE remote sensing data.
To this end, Dr. Asrar created the Applications, Commercialization,
and Education (ACE) division. ACE is pursuing many strategies to ensure
that secondary and tertiary providers with the "domain" expertise have
pathways to make data readily available in a useful format to those
end-user communities. The Earth Science Information Partners (ESIPs),
the Regional Application Centers (RACs), the Regional Earth Science
Application Centers (RESACs) represent a few examples of the growing
list of providers of ESE data, many of whom will be obtaining input data
streams from EOSDIS.
So EOSDIS, in addition to providing data to the broad community of
science users, will now be increasingly tasked to provide basic ESE data
to the value-added data providers if our program is successful. ESIPs and
RESACs, state and local government users, commercial value-added providers
are expected to represent a sizeable part of the EOSDIS user profile.
While this legislation language has gone to the hill, it hasn't
become law yet. Charging for data will not begin until such a time. In
the meantime, billing and accounting policies and procedures will
be developed, with your help. ESE will work with all segments of our
community as this charging policy is instituted to ensure that checks and
balances are maintained and a smooth transition is made to this policy.
In particular, for NASA-funded investigations, distribution costs already
programmed within EOSDIS will be utilized.
