Our project, Data Forensics, is part of our sponsor’s larger Data Afterlives project. The NSF asks researchers to make federally funded data available. We researched NSF awards to see if we could find data associated with these projects. Our findings demonstrate the challenges in finding data and how the accessibility of data varies depending on the NSF research area. We discuss the steps that we took in the course of our research, as well as why this research matters, particularly to information professionals and how national policy shapes the future of open research. We offer future avenues of research.