Data policies - history

General background

• Key principle:– Open access to data – as much as possible– Science – versus commercial– What is the economic value of data• Important in decisions about free availability of data• Fish stock/catch data• Sand extraction data• Oil/Gaz exploitation data

– Lot of data is hidden: extracted by private companies

General background

• Ways to calculate economic value of certain data– Biodiversity data

• Question:– Global distribution data of a shrimp

• What price to pay for such data

– Global distribution of whale species• What price to pay?

– Global distribution of Gaz hydrate areas• What price to pay?

General background

• Data originator – data owner ... ???– Master thesis at Ghent University:• Who is owner of the data?• Can you clame intellectual property?• When is intellectual property made?

– Counting data of species– Weighing species– Identyfying species– Describing species– Genetic codes of species

General background

• Data ownership depends a lot on paying instance for projects!– Example of belgium– Politics are replected in property rights of data• University• Flanders – IWT• National Science Foundation• European Projects• Private companies

History of data availability

• Some milestones:– Up to 17th century:• Salons – letters

– 1665 : first scientific journal : Philosophical Transactions for the Royal Society of London

– Journals libraries– Journals sent to PAYING abbonees– Went on for 300 years

History of data availability

• 1950 s: – Founding of science citation index

• Number of scitations:– Influences journal impact– Influences CV of scientist

• Hierarchy in journals• Evaluation method of science

• Hierarchy journals commercially interesting• Journals were bought by commercial companies• Price of journals raised• Smaller journals into problems • 1991: first preprint service

History of data availability

• 2003: World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) – Role of ICT– Access to information and knowledge– http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/dop.

html• Berlin Declaration on Open Access to

Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

Berlin declaration

Data policies (1)

• What?– Importance of setting rules– Official document in project framework– Official document accompagning a dataset

• Contents:– Who is owner of data– Who may use what parts of the dataset– How to get access to data– On what timeframe is revision needed– What may be done with the data

Data policies (2)

• Examples:– If data used: data originator co-author of publication

• Generation of lot of extra publication (benefit to share data)

– Data can be shared partly on global information systems• Example GBIF• Full dataset: small part is shared with GBIF • Advertisement of data

– Rules like: 2-3-5 years after publication data becomes free– Datamanagement: oblige to preserve all data in good state