An International Framework to Promote Access to Data

Science

Volumn 303, Issue 5665, 2004, Pages 1777-1778

  Arzberger, Peter ^a   Schroeder, Peter ^b   Beaulieu, Anne ^c   Bowker, Geof ^a   Casey, Kathleen ^a   Laaksonen, Leif ^d   Moorman, David ^e   Uhlir, Paul ^f   Wouters, Paul ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b Ministry of Education Culture and Science Netherlands   (Netherlands)

^c ROYAL NETHERLANDS ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES   (Netherlands)

^d IT Center for Science   (Finland)

^e Research Council of Canada   (Canada)

^f NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DATA MANAGEMENT;

CONFIDENTIALITY; DATA ANALYSIS; DECISION MAKING; ENVIRONMENTAL FACTOR; INFORMATION PROCESSING; INFORMATION SYSTEM; MANAGEMENT; PRIORITY JOURNAL; PRIVACY; QUALITY CONTROL; RESEARCH; REVIEW; ACCESS TO INFORMATION; ARTICLE; DATA BASE; INFORMATION DISSEMINATION; INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION; ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT; PRACTICE GUIDELINE;

ACCESS TO INFORMATION; DATABASES; GUIDELINES; INFORMATION DISSEMINATION; INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION; PRIVATE SECTOR; PUBLIC SECTOR; RESEARCH;

EID: 1642318873     PISSN: 00368075     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1126/science.1095958     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. There are many such investments, e.g., the Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development, GLORIAD, is a multinational effort between China, Russia, and the United States that promises greater collaboration in e-science; see www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/03/pr03151.htm.
2. G. Stix, Sci. Am. 284, 80 (January 2001).
3. See, e.g., D. E. Atkins et al., Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure (National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA, January 2003); available at www.cise.nsf.gov/sci/reports/toc.cfm.
4. In Canada, for example, roughly half of the large-scale research projects funded in the social sciences involve International collaborations. Without an international agreement on data sharing or access, each project must formulate its own regime and make compromises on jurisdictional differences. It is only a matter of time before serious conflict arises. Internal analysis of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, (SSHRC)-funded Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (Policy and Planning Division, SSHRC, 2003). See also (19).
5. H. Newman, M. Ellsiman, and J. Orcutt [Commun. ACM 46, 68 (November 2003)] document the increased funding by agencies for large-scale projects that produce large data volumes.
6. S. H. Koslow [Nature Rev. Neurosci. 3, 211 (2002)] outlines complexities of sharing data in Neuroscience.
7. Authors of this article were participants in the study, presented in Paris, 19 March 2003, DSTI/STP(2003)20, "Promoting access to public research data for scientific, economic and social development," which has not been published yet.
8. Science, Technology, and Innovation for the 21st Century, meeting of the OECD Committee for Science and Technological Policy at Ministerial Level, Paris, 29 to 30 January 2004, Final communiqué, Annex 1. Declaration on access to research data from public funding; available at www.oecd.org.
9. R. Colwell, "A global thirst for safe water: The case of cholera," paper presented at the National Academy of Sciences, 25 January 2002; available at www7.nationalacademies.org/wstb/2002_Wolman_Lecture.pdf. This study drew upon data from epidemiology, U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration remote sensing, marine biology, microbiology, genomics, and the social sciences.
10. See, e.g., Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; http://www.ipcc.ch/.
11. The UK Medical Research Council's new policy on Data Sharing and Preservation outlines the benefits of data sharing and drew on preliminary work of this group; www.mrc.ac.uk/index/strategy/strategy-science_strategy/ strategy-strategic_implementation/strategy-data_sharing/ strategy-data_sharing_policy-link.
12. See also NIH's data-sharing policy http://grants2. nih.gov/grants/policy/data_sharing/.
13. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (www.gbif.org), an initiative of the Global Science Forum of the OECD, depends on open access to data across all countries to meet its mission of making biodiversity data available.
14. Data sharing issues in the human genome community also have been publicly and frequently discussed at www.genome.gov/page.cfm?pageID=10S06376.
15. S. E. Marshall, Science 299, 990 (2003).
16. S. Salzberg, E. Bimey, S. Eddy, O. White, Nature 422, 801 (2003).
17. J. Lubchenco, S. Iwata, Science 301, 1443 (2003).
18. In Promise and Practice in Data Sharing, P. Wouters and P. Schroeder (the series editors) present four case studies, conducted by the group, which review practices and policies of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the European Bioinformatics Institute, the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data Centre, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. [The Public Domain of Digital Research Data series, Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services-De Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (NIWI-KNAW), Amsterdam, 2003]; available at www.niwi.knaw.nl/en/nerdi2/pub/pa/pw/datasharing/toonplaatje
19. S. M. Maurer, R. G. Firestone, C. R. Scriver, Nature 405, 117 (2000).
20. A. Finkbeiner, Science 292, 1472 (2001).
21. In Finland, universities are implementing reward structures for people creating digital material. For job applicants, the digital material production will be weighed with the number of publications.
22. Committee for a Pilot Study on Database Interfaces, Finding the Forest in the Trees: The Challenge of Combining Diverse Environmental Data (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1995), provides examples of incentives (pp. 97-98).
23. See the Grants Guides and program policies of the Social Sciences and Humanities Rasearch Council (http://www.sshrc.ca), the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council, (http://www.nserc.ca), and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (http://www.cihr.ca).
24. OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data; available at www.oecd.org.
25. K. McCain, Sci. Technol. Hum. Values 16, 491 (1991).
26. J. Sieber, Law Hum. Behav. 12, 199 (1998).
27. "Incentives for data sharing need to be offered that offset the investigators' loss of control over their databases. Ultimately there has to be a procedural framework that makes sharing sensible, efficient, and value-added. If all those pieces are in place, fewer external or coercive forces are needed to convince researchers to share." Minutes of the 196th National Advisory Mental Health Council Meeting, Bethesda, MD, 14 September 2000; available at www.nimh.nih.gov/council/min900.cfm.
28. P. Weiss, "Borders in cyberspace: Conflicting public sector information policies and their economic impact" (U.S. National Weather Service, February 2002); available at www.weather.gov/sp/Borders_report.pdf.
29. "Commercial exploitation of Europe's public sector information: Final report for the European Commission Directorate General for the Information Society, prepared by Pira International Ltd., University of East Anglia, and Knowledge View Ltd., Surbiton, Surrey, UK, 20 September 2000.
30. Commission of the European Communities, "Public sector information: A key resource for Europe" [COM(98)585 European Commission, Brussels, 1999], final adopted on 20 January 1999; available at http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/docs/policy/docs/COM(98) 585/.
31. J. M. Esanu, P. F. Uhlir, Eds., The Role of Scientific and Technical Data in the Public Domain: Proceedings of a Symposium (National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2003), p. 226.
32. J. M. Esanu, P. F. Uhlir, Eds., Open Access and Public Domain in Digital Data and Information for Science: Proceedings of an International Symposium (National Academies Press, Washington, DC, in press).
33. J. H. Reichman, P. F. Uhlir, Law Contemp. Probl. 66, 315 (winter-spring 2003).
34. D. Butler, Nature 427, 275 (2004). The Ministerial Meeting (8) also endorsed the establishment of an International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility, the beginnings of a new neuroscience network (Annex 4).
35. Key barriers for involvement of data providers in developing countries include the basic physical infrastructure and control by governments of public information. Positive data access examples in developing countries are discussed in (32).
36. Participants from the United States were supported by the NSF through grant ACI-96 19020; cofunded by the Office of International Science and Engineering, the Divisions of Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research. Biological Infrastructure, and Social and Economic Sciences and the Directorate for Math and Physical Sciences. The Netherlands' Ministry of Education, Culture and Science sponsored the two studies on data access published by NIWI-KNAW. Other support was provided by the Secretariat of the international CODATA (Committee on Data for Science and Technology), Polish State Committee for Scientific Research, and the European Science Foundation. The views expressed by the authors are their own and not necessarily those of their employers or supporting agencies.