open research

Interesting announcement regarding publicly funded research and it's associated digital data retention policies:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/increasing-public-access-resul...

Ars Technica discussion regarding the announcement:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/obama-administration-backs-open-a...

Any thoughts on the relevancy of these changes on the need for tools that will help to ease the process?

This would appear to be the best place to start discussion. Please include only a single module and reasoning for choosing the module. Once a significant number of modules have been identified it would be interesting to experiment with the set to determine what features would appear to be missing.

For example:
Module - Views
Justification - Currently the simplest method to expose collected data in a tabular form to end users. It easily provides multiple variations on the data and it also allows for manipulation of data in a consistent way.