Research Questions：Rules for the cross-border flow of open data

Conclusion：

This year’s State of Open Data report contains a surprising insight about researchers’ attitudes to policy mandates.  Of the survey participants based in Asia, 42% believe funders should withhold funding or penalize researchers for not sharing their data if the funder has mandated that they do so at the grant application stage.  This sentiment puts the onus on funders to check compliance yet the

STM Association’s 2021 research on funders with data policies found that less than one quarter actually checked compliance.  The large variation in the content and strength of data policies continues to be a challenge to researchers’ understanding and compliance.  While solid progress has been made in the area of publisher policies, we need to standardize and harmonize data sharing policies within and between publishers and funders.  The funder-publisher alignment project currently underway through the Research Data Alliance offers promising progress in this area.

Hurdles to data sharing in the area of policy and cultural change will fall short if we do not have underpinning research infrastructure and the experts needed to run the infrastructure.  We need world class data repositories, virtual research environments, facilities, supercomputers and the like to support open and FAIR data in all disciplines.  We

need information infrastructure on a global scale that enables interoperable human and machine readability of metadata, standards, and persistent identifiers to support data sharing and these need to be well established in research communities and embedded into research workflows.  Nobuko Miyairi’s interview with Keisuke Iida from the Japan Science and Technology Agency shares insights into the development of J-STAGE Data, an evidence data platform for Japan’s learned society publishing.  Iida outlines the challenges of building a data platform needed to match rapid changes in the scholarly publishing and technology landscape.

There have been vast improvements in data infrastructure with the development of national and regional cloud services such as the European Open Science Cloud and the China Science and Technology Cloud.  Alignment, cooperation, and interoperability between open science clouds is important as research is global, and initiatives such as CODATA’s Global Open Science Cloud aim to make progress in this area.  Indeed, international collaboration through forums such as the Research Data Alliance, CODATA, GO FAIR and FORCE11 play a key role in identifying the challenges of policy, infrastructure, and culture change in open data and open science and putting forward solutions to these.

The State of Open Data report provides insights and commentary to the progress and challenges in researchers’ attitudes and behaviors in open data.  I hope you are as excited as I am to read the report to reflect on how far we have come in open data and where we need to go if we are to address the big challenges of our time and save lives.

Proposal：

This year’s State of Open Data report contains a surprising insight about researchers’ attitudes to policy mandates.  Of the survey participants based in Asia, 42% believe funders should withhold funding or penalize researchers for not sharing their data if the funder has mandated that they do so at the grant application stage.  This sentiment puts the onus on funders to check compliance yet the

STM Association’s 2021 research on funders with data policies found that less than one quarter actually checked compliance.  The large variation in the content and strength of data policies continues to be a challenge to researchers’ understanding and compliance.  While solid progress has been made in the area of publisher policies, we need to standardize and harmonize data sharing policies within and between publishers and funders.  The funder-publisher alignment project currently underway through the Research Data Alliance offers promising progress in this area.

Hurdles to data sharing in the area of policy and cultural change will fall short if we do not have underpinning research infrastructure and the experts needed to run the infrastructure.  We need world class data repositories, virtual research environments, facilities, supercomputers and the like to support open and FAIR data in all disciplines.  We

need information infrastructure on a global scale that enables interoperable human and machine readability of metadata, standards, and persistent identifiers to support data sharing and these need to be well established in research communities and embedded into research workflows.  Nobuko Miyairi’s interview with Keisuke Iida from the Japan Science and Technology Agency shares insights into the development of J-STAGE Data, an evidence data platform for Japan’s learned society publishing.  Iida outlines the challenges of building a data platform needed to match rapid changes in the scholarly publishing and technology landscape.

There have been vast improvements in data infrastructure with the development of national and regional cloud services such as the European Open Science Cloud and the China Science and Technology Cloud.  Alignment, cooperation, and interoperability between open science clouds is important as research is global, and initiatives such as CODATA’s Global Open Science Cloud aim to make progress in this area.  Indeed, international collaboration through forums such as the Research Data Alliance, CODATA, GO FAIR and FORCE11 play a key role in identifying the challenges of policy, infrastructure, and culture change in open data and open science and putting forward solutions to these.

The State of Open Data report provides insights and commentary to the progress and challenges in researchers’ attitudes and behaviors in open data.  I hope you are as excited as I am to read the report to reflect on how far we have come in open data and where we need to go if we are to address the big challenges of our time and save lives.