The scope of scientific data is vast. The Working Group will limit its attention
as much as possible to source data (factual data; observations, measurements recorded
in text as well as images and sound) usable as input for research as distinct
from bibliographical data. As the project is being conducted primarily for governments,
it will focus primarily on data collected with public funds. These could be data
collected for academic research, but also data collected for other governmental
purposes (census data, environmental data from meteorological, geological and
geographical surveys). As publicly funded data can end up in datasets compiled
by commercial firms, arrangements with market parties cannot be excluded. The
Working Group will focus on arrangements of access and sharing according to their
current and future scientific and socio-economic significance.
III.2. Current problems
The Working Group will treat obstacles (lack of co-ordination, inaccessibility,
monopolies) to data access and sharing that lead to inefficiencies in the management
of valuable research data in various fields. The Group will look at confusion
about ownership, terms of access, ways of sharing and legal and economic factors.
It will address the lack of systematic policy on the accession of research data
suitable for multiple uses in many disciplines and institutions.
III.3. Contribution to solutions
The Working Group seeks to promote data sharing and multiple use of data. It aims
to support the development of data sharing policies by governments, funding agencies
and research institutions by outlining a set of principles derived from best practices
of access to research data, and corresponding formal governmental responsibilities
for research data. The Working Group's research will suggest the role of policy
in optimising the access to data. The Group hopes to make researchers and their
institutions aware of the ways and means to bet more quality and quantity out
of their access to data. The Group will examine the interplay of informal data
sharing practices and more formal policy regimes as these occur in the process
of institutional upscaling. In this respect the recent policy measures of the
US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a good model. (see "Draft
Statement on Sharing Research Data"). In addition, the Group will build
on activities of other professional societies, such as the work of CODATA on principles
to data access (see http://www.codata.org/data_access/principles.html
specifically and http://www.codata.org/data_access/index.html
in general). III.4. Means
The Working Group will present a Report for governments (public funding agencies,
public employed researchers) giving recommendations on Access regimes for publicly
funded research data. The Report will contain recommendations focussing on Principles
to build these Access regimes. These Principles will be derived from
- Formal responsibilities of governments and public funded research organisations
and
- Existing good practices of policies and management of research data (levels
of the institute and the community).
III.5. Working premises
Publicly funded data should be publicly available. Exploiting data as the basis
of the value chain of science and technology will give an optimum return on public
investments that otherwise would be hard to attain. Moreover, in the global knowledge-based
society, science as well as business are to benefit from the lowest possible entry
barriers to research data.
At the level of management, cost of access should be included in the business
model of publicly funded research. Optimum access to publicly funded research
data is maximum access from the point of view of:
- Respecting democratic information rights
- Good stewardship of public resources
- Deriving maximum return on public investments, i.e., creating and extending
value chains of investments.