More on the ICTHES journals

I've had 3 responses by email to yesterday's post on the ICTHES journals (some responding to an associated email from me on the same issue). I'll summarise the two where quote permission was not explicit, and quote the third at length.

Adam Farquhar of the BL told me he had discussed it with their serials processing team under the voluntary scheme for legal deposit of digital material, and they will download the material into the BL's digital archive, where it will become accessible in the reading rooms (in due course, I guess). Wider access to such open access material should be available later under their digital library programme.

Tony Kidd, of the University of Glasgow and UKSG suggested that an OpenLOCKSS type approach might be feasible. This is consistent with the email from Vicky Reich of LOCKSS; she told me I could post her response. So here it is:

"UK-LOCKSS can, and should, preserve the four ICTHES journals.

• First step: Contact the publisher and ask them to leave the content online long enough for it to be ingested.
• Second step: Ask the publisher to put online a LOCKSS permission statement.
• Third step: Someone on the LOCKSS team does a small amount of technical work to get content ingested.

With these minimal actions, the content would be available to those institutions who are preserving it in their LOCKSS box.

If librarians want to rehost this O/A content for others, there are two additional requirements:

• a) the content has to be licensed to allow re-publication by someone other than the original copyright holder. This is best done via a Creative Commons license.
• b) institutions who hold the content have to be willing to bear the cost of hosting the journals on behalf of the world.

Librarians, even those who advocate open access have not taken coordinated steps to ensure the OA literature remains viable over the long term. Librarians are motivated to ensure perpetual access to very expensive subscription literature, but ensuring the safety of the OA literature is not a priority because... it's available, and it's free. [...]

When the majority of librarians who think open access is a "good idea" step up and preserve this content (and I don't mean shoving individual articles into institutional repositories), then we will be well on our way to building needed infrastructure"

See also the comment from Gavin Baker to yesterday's post, which i think backs up Vicky's last point:

"I've thought for a while that archiving OA journals should be a goal of the library and OA community, maybe via a consortium which would harvest new issues of journals listed in the DOAJ. (We can treat as separate, for these purposes, the question of short-term archiving in case a journal goes under from the question of long-term preservation.) Is there a reason why this approach isn't undertaken? Do people assume that any OA journal worth archiving is already being archived by somebody somewhere?"

Let's be quite clear, contrary to my simplistic assumptions, the Internet Archive is NOT undertaking this task!

Charity closing, possible loss of 4 OA titles

I note from Gavin Baker's [not Peter Suber's; my mistake- CR] blog entry that the charity ICTHES is closing, and as a result its 4 OA journals, listed may disappear. I have checked the Internet Archive, and in case we should be complacent about that as a system of preservation, found only 1 issue out of 18 issues from 4 titles had actually been gathered there.

The Journals are

• Developing Mental Health
  
• Community Ear and Hearing Health
• Community Dermatology
• Repair & Reconstruction

I see from Suncat that these titles are variously held by BL, Cambridge, Oxford and NLS, so I guess they are regarded as serious titles.

Since UKSG is now in progress, I wondered if I could challenge UKSG on what it (or we, the community) can and/or should and/or will do about this! Would there be any opportunity in the programme to discuss this? (BTW unfortunately I am not able to come to Torquay, so I'm niggling, and indeed watching the #uksg tweets, from a distance.)

Options for action that I can see include

a) some kind of sponsored crawl by Internet Archive

b) an emergency sponsored crawl by UKWAC or one of its participants (which may of course already have happened),

c) an urgent approach by a group of those participating in LOCKSS for the charity to join the programme (which may be stymied by lack of development effort and time), would only make available to participants, I think

d) Ditto for CLOCKSS, which at least might have the resources to make available publicly on a continuing basis,

e) sponsored ingest into something like Portico; again, only available to participants as I understand it

f) tacitly suggest libraries grab copies of the 18 or so PDFs, or

g) get a group of libraries to offer to host a historical archive of the titles for the charity...

h) appraise the titles as not worth preserving, and consign to the bitbin of history

i) ummm, errr, dither...

PS this blog entry is based on an email sent to the conference organisers and others, unfortunately after the conference has started. I have already had one response, from the BL, suggesting they would discuss with their journals people...

Wilbanks on the Control Fallacy: How Radical Sharing out-competes

Closing the first day of the International Digital Curation Conference, and as a prelude to a substantial audience discussion, John Wilbanks from Science Commons outlined his vision and his group’s plans and achievements. His slides are available on Slideshare and from the IDCC web site.

John suggests that the only real alternative to radical sharing is inefficient sharing! Science (research and scholarship, to be more general) is in a way not unlike a giant Wikipedia, an ever-changing consensus machine, based on publishing (disclosing, making things public); advances by individual action, and by discrete edits (ie small changes to the body of research represented by individual research contributions). Unlike Wikipedia the Science consensus machine is slow and expensive, but it does have strong authentication and trust. It represents an “inefficient and expensive ecosystem of processes to peer-produce and review scholarly content”.

However, disruptive processes can’t be planned for, and when they occur, attract opposition from entrenched interests (open access is one such disruptive system). So a scholarly paper may be thought of as “an advertisement for years of scholarship” (I think he gave a reference but I can’t find it). International research forms a highly stable system, good at resisting change on multiple levels, and in many cases this is a Good Thing. This system includes Copyright (Wilbanks suggested IPR was an unpopular term, new to me but perhaps a US perspective); traditionally, in the analogue world, copyright locks up the container, not the facts. New publishing business models lock up even more rights on “rented” information. If we can deposit our own articles (estimated cost 40 minutes per researcher per year), then we can add further services over our own material (individually or collectively), including tracking use and re-use; then we can out-compete the non-sharers.

Science Commons has been working for the past 2 years focusing their efforts in both the particular (one research domain, building the Neurocommons) and the general; their approach requires sharing. They discovered two things quite early on: first that international rules on intellectual property in data vary so widely that building a general data licence to parallel the Creative Commons licences for text was near impossible, and second that viral licences (like the Creative Commons Share-Alike licences, and the GPL) act against sharing, since content under different viral licences cannot be mixed. So their plan is to try putting their data into the public domain as the most free approach. They use a protocol (not licence) for implementing open data. reward comes through trademark, badging as part of the same “tribe”. Enforcement doesn’t apply; community norms rule, as they do in other areas of scholarly publishing. For example attribution is a legal term of art (!!), but in scholarly publishing we prefer the use of citations to acknowledge sources, with the alternative for an author being possible accusations of plagiarism, rather than legal action (in most cases).

There was some more, on the specifics of their projects, on trying to get support in ‘omics areas for a semantic web of linked concepts, built around simple, freely alterable ontologies; how doing this will help Google Scholar rank papers better. Well worth a look at the slides (worth while anyway, since I may well have got some of this wrong!). But Wilbanks ended with a resounding rallying cry: Turn those locks into gears! Don’t wait, start now.

UK Repositories claiming to hold data

The OpenDOAR and ROAR services both present self-reported claims by repositories across the world about their contents, backed up by some harvested facts. I’m interested in those UK repositories that claim to hold data.

My first problem is that neither repository allows me simply to choose data. OpenDOAR allows me to search on “Datasets” (63 world-wide, 8 in the UK), while ROAR allows me to search for “Database/A&I Index” (24 world-wide, 6 in the UK). I thought the latter was a surprisingly “library science” classification, given the origins of ROAR. Not surprisingly, most repositories are in only one of the lists. Also not surprisingly given the origins of these services in the Open Access and OAI-PMH movements, there are many first class data repositories NOT listed here (UKDA and BADC, for example).

The UK repositories listed are:

OpenDOAR “Datasets”

• Bristol Repository of Scholarly Eprints (ROSE)
• DSpace @ Cambridge
• eCrystals - Southampton
• Edinburgh DataShare
• Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA)
• Leicester Research Archive (LRA)
• NDAD (National Digital Archive of Datasets)
• Nature Precedings
  

Looking at the OpenDOAR listing, and linking through to the repositories themselves, I find it very difficult to actually FIND the datasets in most cases. Looking at ERA, for example, there is no effective search for these datasets. Browsing soon leads to the realisation that the contents are papers, articles, theses, etc. Some of these may have datsets associated or within them, but they are a bit shy! The Edinburgh Datashare repository is a pilot, but does have a couple of real datasets. In a different way, Nature Precedings also is shy of disclosing its datasets.

The 3 that do have serious amounts of data are DSpace @ Cambridge, eCrystals and NDAD. DSpace @ Cambridge is dominated by the 100,000 ++ collection of chemical structures encoded in CML, but there are plenty of other datasets there, including some from Archaeology. Sadly, there are plenty of empty collections, and many collections where the last deposit was 2006 (I guess around when the funded project died). eCrystals is completely crystal structures, and has some very nice features; find a compound, and as you look perhaps rather bemused at the page, a Java object loads and there you have a rotatable image of the molecular structure before your eyes on the data page! NDAD also has many ex-Government datasets, some of them very large.

ROAR “Database/A&I Index”

• Higher Education Empirical Research Database (1642 records)
• NDAD - UK National Digital Archive of Datasets (66 records)
• ReOrient Knowledge Base
• Research Findings Register (1496 records)
• Southampton Crystal Structure Report Archive (165 records)
• The Linnean Collections (14275 records)

NDAD and eCrystals (under a slightly different name) appear again in this ROAR set. Of the others, HEER seems to be closed (it wanted a password for every page I found), and ReFer seems to have been withdrawn. ReOrient seems to be frozen and to present its data in the form of maps, while the Linnaean Collection seems to be images (which can, of course, be good data as well).

It’s a rather sad study! I do hope that the Open Repositories 2008 conference in Southampton over the next couple of days leads to an improvement. I can't get there, unfortunately, but I hope someone will report from it here. I particularly liked the idea of the developers challenges. Can we have some oriented to data, please?

Posting gap… and intriguing article on “borrowed data”

Apologies to those of you who were interested in this blog; there has been only one posting since the end of August. Shortly after that I went off-air after an accident, and since then I have been recovering. Although not yet officially back at work, I hope I have now reached the point where I can start making some postings again.

To alleviate potential boredom, a friend gave me some back issue of New Scientist to read. The first one I opened was the issue for 20 January, 2007. On page 14, the first paragraph of an article titled “Loner stakes claim to gravity prize” jumped out at me. It read:

“A lone researcher working with borrowed data may have pipped a $700 million NASA mission to be the first to measure an obscure subtlety of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.”

The thrust of the New Scientist piece is that this “lone researcher” had re-analysed another scientist’s analysis of the orbit of a NASA satellite of Mars, and claimed to have found evidence of the Lense-Thirring effect, a twisting of space-time near a large rotating mass, ahead of NASA’s own expensive mission.

Borrowed data? This had to be worth following up! The relevant article is “Testing frame-dragging with the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft in the gravitational field of Mars” by Lorenzo Iorio, available from http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0701042. If you check that reference you may note that 3 versions of the article had been deposited by the cover date of the New Scientist piece, but that he is now up to version 10, deposited on 14 May 2007. Checking the “cited by” citations in SLAC-SPIRES HEP shows that this article has been very controversial, with many comments and replies to comments, apparently contributing to the development of the article (although the authors of these comments don’t get any acknowledgments as far as I could see). Nevertheless, it does look like a nice example of the value of an open approach to science. I don’t know how much the final article is now accepted, although it does seem now to form part of a book chapter (L. Iorio (ed.) The Measurement of Gravitomagnetism: A Challenging Enterprise, Chap. 12.2, NOVA Publishers, Hauppauge (NY), 2007. ISBN: 1-60021-002-3).

What about the borrowed data? The Acknowledgments section has: “I gratefully thank A. Konopliv, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), for having kindly provided me with the entire MGS data set”. He does not give an explicit data citation. It appears however, that Iorio is not referring to the publicly accessible science results accessible from JPL. In section 2, he writes:

“In [24] six years of MGS Doppler and range tracking data and three years of Mars Odyssey Doppler and range tracking data were analyzed in order to obtain information about several features of the Mars gravity field summarized in the global solution MGS95J. As a by-product, also the orbit of MGS was determined with great accuracy.”

Reference 24 is “Konopliv A S et al 2006 Icarus 182 23”, which appears to be “A global solution for the Mars static and seasonal gravity, Mars orientation, Phobos and Deimos masses, and Mars ephemeris”, by Alex S. Konopliv, Charles F. Yoder, E. Myles Standish, Dah-Ning Yuan and William L. Sjogren., in Icarus Volume 182, Issue 1, May 2006, Pages 23-50. In turn, this paper acknowledges “Dick Simpson and Boris Semenov provided much of the MGS and Odyssey data used in this paper mostly through the PDS archive”, and this time there is a relevant data citation: “Semenov, B.V., Acton Jr., C.H., Elson, L.S., 2004a. MGS MARS SPICE KERNELS V1.0, MGS-M-SPICE-6-V1.0. NASA Planetary Data System”. However this presumably represents the source data from which Konopliv et al did their calculations.

(BTW I have yet to find a formal place where JPL PDS define their requirements for data citations, but there are a couple of examples in http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/documents/pag/MERDSC.doc, and the citation above sticks to that guideline.)

It looks like the “borrowed data” is in fact provided on a colleague-to-colleague basis. It is clear from some of the replies that there was correspondence between Iorio and Konopliv on some matters of interpretation.

Nevertheless, this seems like a couple of useful examples of science being discovered from the analysis of original and derived datasets established for another purpose, and hence of relevance to data curation. And who knows, maybe the $700 million Gravity Probe mission launched by NASA will turn out not to have been necessary after all?

BTW I tried to follow this story through New Scientist’s online service, to which my University has a subscription. I was asked for my ATHENS credentials, which I provided, but was then thrown out on an IP address check, despite using a VPN. How not to get good use of your magazine!

IJDC again

At the end of July I reported on the second issue of the International Journal of Digital Curation (IJDC), and asked some questions:

"We are aware, by the way, that there is a slight problem with our journal in a presentational sense. Take the article by Graham Pryor, for instance: it contains various representations of survey results presented as bar charts, etc in a PDF file (and we know what some people think about PDF and hamburgers). Unfortunately, the data underlying these charts are not accessible!

"For various reasons, the platform we are using is an early version of the OJS system from the Public Knowledge Project. It's pretty clunky and limiting, and does tend to restrict what we can do. Now that release 2 is out of the way, we will be experimenting with later versions, with an aim to including supplementary data (attached? External?) or embedded data (RDFa? Microformats?) in the future. Our aim is to practice what we may preach, but we aren't there yet."

I didn't get any responses, but over on the eFoundations blog, Andy Powell was taking us to task for only offering PDF:

"Odd though, for a journal that is only ever (as far as I know) intended to be published online, to offer the articles using PDF rather than HTML. Doing so prevents any use of lightweight 'semantic' markup within the articles, such as microformats, and tends to make re-use of the content less easy."

His blog is more widely read than this one, and he attracted 11 comments! The gist of them was that PDF plus HTML (or preferably XML) was the minimum that we should be offering. For example, Chris Leonard [update, not Tom Wilson! See end comments] wrote:

"People like to read printed-out pdfs (over 90% of accesses to the fulltext are of the pdf version) - but machines like to read marked-up text. We also make the xml versions availble for precisely this purpose."

Cornelius Puschmann [update, not Peter Sefton] wrote:

"Yeah, but if you really want semantic markup why not do it right and use XML? The problematic thing with OJS (at least to some extent) is/was that XML article versions are not the basis for the "derived" PDF and HTML, which deal almost purely with visuals. XML is true semantic markup and therefore the best way to store articles in the long term (who knows what formats we'll have 20 years from now?). HTML can clearly never fill that role - it's not its job either. From what I've heard OJS will implement XML (and through it neat things such as OpenOffice editing of articles while they're in the workflow) via Lemon8 in the future."

Bruce D'Arcus [update, not Jeff] says:

"As an academic, I prefer the XHTML + PDF option myself. There are times I just want to quickly view an article in a browser without the hassle of PDF. There are other times I want to print it and read it "on the train."

"With new developments like microformats and RDFa, I'd really like to see a time soon where I can even copy-and-paste content from HTML articles into my manuscripts and have the citation metadata travel with it."

Jeff [update, not Cornelius Puschmann] wrote:

"I was just checking through some OJS-based journals and noticed that several of them are only in PDF. Hmmm, but a few are in HTML and PDF. It has been a couple of years since I've examined OJS but it seems that OJS provides the tools to generate both HTML and PDF, no? Ironically, I was going to do a quick check of the OJS documentation but found that it's mostly only in PDF!

"I suspect if a journal decides not to provide HTML then it has some perceived limitations with HTML. Often, for scholarly journals, that revolves around the lack of pagination. I noticed one OJS-based journal using paragraph numbering but some editors just don't like that and insist on page numbers for citations. Hence, I would be that's why they chose PDF only."

I think in this case we used only PDF because that was all our (old) version of the OJS platform allowed. I certainly wanted HTML as well. As I said before, we're looking into that, and hope to move to a newer version of the platform soon. I'm not sure it has been an issue, but I believe HTML can be tricky for some kinds of articles (Maths used to be a real difficulty, but maybe they've fixed that now).

I think my preference is for XHTML plus PDF, with the authoritative source article in XML. I guess the workflow should be author-source -> XML -> XHTML plus PDF, where author-source is most likely to be MS Word or LaTeX... Perhaps in the NLM DTD (that seems to be the one people are converging towards, and it's the one adopted by a couple of long term archiving platforms)?

But I'm STILL looking for more concrete ideas on how we should co-present data with our articles!

[Update: Peter Sefton pointed out to me in a comment that I had wrongly attributed a quote to him (and by extension, to everyone); the names being below rather than above the comments in Andy's article. My apologies for such a basic error, which also explains why I had such difficulty finding the blog that Peter's actual comment mentions; I was looking in someone else's blog! I have corrected the names above.

In fact Peter's blog entry is very interesting; he mentions the ICE-RS project, which aims to provide a workflow that will generate both PDF and HTML, and also bemoans how inhospitable most repository software is to HTML. He writes:

"It would help for the Open Access community and repository software publishers to help drive the adoption of HTML by making OA repositories first-class web citizens. Why isn't it easy to put HTML into Eprints, DSpace, VITAL and Fez?

"To do our bit, we're planning to integrate ICE with Eprints, DSpace and Fedora later this year building on the outcomes from the SWORD project – when that's done I'll update my papers in the USQ repository, over the Atom Publishing Protocol interface that SWORD is developing."

So thanks again Peter for bringing this basic error to my attention, apologies to you and others I originally mis-quoted, and I look forward to the results of your efforts! End Update]

IJDC Issue 2

I am very happy that Issue 2 of the International Journal of Digital Curation (IJDC) is now out. This open access journal issue contains 7 peer-reviewed papers and 7 general articles.

I am listed as editor, and did write the editorial, but Richard Waller of UKOLN did all the hard editorial work, in between his day job on Ariadne. Not to mention our authors, of course! My heartfelt thanks to all concerned.

We have a few articles in the pipeline for Issue 3, but I do want to get up a good head of steam. So if you, dear reader, care about digital curation, the care and feeding of science data, the relationship of data to publication, the rights and wrongs of access to data, and/or digital preservation, and have some research results to put forward, please do write us a paper or an article!

We are aware, by the way, that there is a slight problem with our journal in a presentational sense. Take the article by Graham Pryor, for instance: it contains various representations of survey results presented as bar charts, etc in a PDF file (and we know what some people think about PDF and hamburgers). Unfortunately, the data underlying these charts are not accessible!

For various reasons, the platform we are using is an early version of the OJS system from the Public Knowledge Project. It's pretty clunky and limiting, and does tend to restrict what we can do. Now that release 2 is out of the way, we will be experimenting with later versions, with an aim to including supplementary data (attached? External?) or embedded data (RDFa? Microformats?) in the future. Our aim is to practice what we may preach, but we aren't there yet.

If anyone knows how to do this, do please get in touch!

Open Data... Open Season?

Peter Murray Rust is an enthusiastic advocate of Open Data (the discussion runs right through his blog, this link is just to one of his articles that is close to the subject). I understand him to want to make science data openly accessible for scientific access and re-use. It sounds a pretty good thing! Are there significant downsides?

Mags McGinley recently posted in the DCC Blawg about the report "Building the Infrastructure for Data Access and Reuse in Collaborative Research" from the Australian OAK Law project. This report includes a substantial section (Chapter 4) on Current Practices and Attitudes to Data Sharing, which includes 31 examples, many from the genomics and related areas. Peter MR wants a very strong definition of Open Access (defined by Peter Suber as BBB, for Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin, which effectively requires no restrictions on reuse, even commercially). Although licences were often not clear, what could be inferred in these 31 cases generally would probably not fit the BBB definition.

However, buried in the middle of the report is a cautionary tale. Towards the end of chapter 4, there is a section on risks of open data in relation to patents, following on from experiences in the Human Genome and related projects.

"Claire Driscoll of the NIH describes the dilemma as follows:

It would be theoretically possible for an unscrupulous company or entity to add on a trivial amount of information to the published…data and then attempt to secure ‘parasitic’ patent claims such that all others would be prohibited from using the original public data."

(The reference given is Claire T Driscoll, ‘NIH data and resource sharing, data release and intellectual property policies for genomics community resource projects’ Expert Opin. Ther. Patents (2005) 15(1), 4)

The report goes on:

"Consequently, subsequent research projects relied on licensing methods in an attempt to restrict the development of intellectual property in downstream discoveries based on the disclosed data, rather than simply releasing the data into the public domain."

They then discuss the HapMap (International Haplotype) project, which attempted to make data available while restricting the possibilities for parasitic patenting.

"Individual genotypes were made available on the HapMap website, but anyone seeking to use the research data was first required to register via the website and enter into a click-wrap licence for the use of the data. The licence entered into, the International HapMap Project Public Access Licence, was explicitly modeled on the General Public Licence (GPL) used by open source software developers. A central term of the licence related to patents. It allowed users of the HapMap data to file patent applications on associations they uncovered between particular SNP data and disease or disease susceptibility, but the patent had to allow further use of the HapMap data. The licence specifically prohibited licensees from combining the HapMap data with their own in order to seek product patents..."

Checking HapMap, the Project's Data Release Policy describes the process, but the link to the Click-Wrap agreement says that the data is now open. See also the NIH press release). There were obvious problems, in that the data could not be incorporated into more open databases. The turning point for them seems to be:

"...advances led the consortium to conclude that the patterns of human genetic variation can readily be determined clearly enough from the primary genotype data to constitute prior art. Thus, in the view of the consortium, derivation of haplotypes and 'haplotype tag SNPs' from HapMap data should be considered obvious and thus not patentable. Therefore, the original reasons for imposing the licensing requirement no longer exist and the requirement can be dropped."

So, they don't say the threat does not exist from all such open data releases, but that it was mitigated in this case.

Are there other examples of these kinds of restrictions being imposed? Or of problems ensuing because they have not been imposed, and the data left open? (Note, I'm not at all advocating closed access!)

OECD Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data

Drafts of the OECD’s Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research data from Public Funding (OECD, 2007) have been available for some time, and the final Recommendation was approved in December 2006. I have only recently had the chance to read the report that details and explains this recommendation. This is a very important document, which could have a major effect on our scientific information systems.

The arguments they put forward in support of the Recommendation are powerful:

“Effective access to research data, in a responsible and efficient manner, is required to take full advantage of the new opportunities and benefits offered by ICTs. Accessibility to research data has become an important condition in:

• The good stewardship of the public investment in factual information;
• The creation of strong value chains of innovation;
• The enhancement of value from international co-operation.

More specifically, improved access to, and sharing of, data:

• Reinforces open scientific inquiry;
• Encourages diversity of analysis and opinion;
• Promotes new research;
• Makes possible the testing of new or alternative hypotheses and methods of analysis;
• Supports studies on data collection methods and measurement;
• Facilitates the education of new researchers;
• Enables the exploration of topics not envisioned by the initial investigators;
• Permits the creation of new data sets when data from multiple sources are combined.

Sharing and open access to publicly funded research data not only helps
to maximise the research potential of new digital technologies and networks,
but provides greater returns from the public investment in research.”

I had not realised the strength of Recommendations. The report makes clear that a Recommendation is a “legal instrument of the OECD that is not legally binding but through a long standing practice of the member countries, is considered to have a great moral force”, and calls it a “soft law”. They say “Recommendations are considered to be vehicles for change, and OECD member countries need not, on the day of adoption, already be in conformity. What is expected is that they will seriously work towards attaining the standard or objective within a reasonable time frame considering the extent of difficulty in closing the gap in each member country.”

The actual Recommendation is perhaps not as strong as this might suggest. It states “that member countries should take into consideration the Principles and Guidelines on Access to Research Data from Public Funding set out in the Annex to the Recommendation, as appropriate for each member country, to develop policies and good practices related to the accessibility, use and management of research data.” This falls rather short of a recommendation to implement them. However, they do propose to review implementation after a period.

The message is that when deciding on access arrangements to research data (both well defined), the governments should take account of the principles and guidelines. The Principles are, in summary:

• Openness
• Transparency
• Legal conformity
• Formal responsibility
• Professionalism
• Protection of intellectual property
• Interoperability
• Quality and security
• Efficiency
• Accountability

They are all important, and it’s well worth reading the document to find out more. However, the first is perhaps key. Note how carefully it is worded:

“Openness means access on equal terms for the international research community at the lowest possible cost, preferably at no more than the marginal cost of dissemination. Open access to research data from public funding should be easy, timely, user-friendly and preferably Internet-based.”

I do commend this document to anyone who is working on policy and implementation aspects of research data resources.

OECD (2007) OECD Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding. Paris. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/9/61/38500813.pdf