NSF Sets Guardrails for Research Security Analytics

Rebecca Keiser, NSF’s chief of research security strategy and policy, at a Senate hearing in 2019.
U.S. Senate
The National Science Foundation announced
Office director Rebecca Keiser emphasized in a foreword to the guidelines that agency program officers will not be permitted to use such analytics as part of the merit review process, shielding them from the “burden of geopolitics.”
The analytics will only be conducted by staff members in her office, who will be prohibited from making inquiries that are “explicitly or implicitly designed to return the identities of individuals of a specific national origin or racial identity.”
NSF states these analytics are designed only to identify “potential compliance inconsistencies” and does not view them as “investigations,” which are handled by the agency’s Office of Inspector General.