19^th International CODATA Conference
Category: World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)

Cherishing the Memory of Science: Towards International Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding

Peter Schröder (p.schroder@minocw.nl)
Co-ordinator for Information Policy, The Ministry of Education and Science, The Netherlands

Sir Isaac Newton hit the nail on the head when writing in 1676 : "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Only after a serious search through the data, information and knowledge generated by the long standing international community of scientists, a scientist will be able to observe, analyze and discover natural phenomena "on his own" (and qualify for the Nobel prize). To be able to climb the shoulders of the scientific giants of Newton's time, access to a limited corpus of written sources, letters, journals and books in libraries and archives was sufficient. Finding your scientific way in the expanding universe of our contemporary global science system requires capacities and facilities of quite another order. Since the brain capacity of researchers has not increased, climbing the ladder to the shoulders of science's giants now calls for access to ever more extensive and complex ICT facilities : giant databases, mega repositories of scientific journals, colossal archives and the contiously expanding Internet to connect researchers with information.

The recent jumps in scales and scope of these facilities is bringing dramatic changes to the way our global science system operates. Digitisation has become an essential part of the scientific process and the management of research. To sum these changes up in a simplified manner: Yesterday's scientists studied Nature, but today's scientists study digital data. Digital data on Nature to be sure.
Yesterday Sir Isaac Newton did not need more than a pencil and a pad to process his observational data into the ground breaking scientific laws we know him by.
But today the next step in physics demands a Large Hadron Collider that will produce 12 to 14 Petabytes of digital data per year, the full capacity of about 16 million CD ROM's, to be analysed by some 6.000 researchers, scattered around the world, but tightly knit by the Grid computer-network of our global science system.

In this way use of ICT has made collections of scientific data in many respects comparable to musical scores: to be used time and again for a diversity of performances by a diversity of artists for the different audiences of society. Optimum access to research data should enable researchers from all over the world to compose the full score for our knowledge based international society.

Consequently, access to the gold mine of research data has become quickly a major issue in international science policy and research management. The traditional exchange arrangements between scientific colleagues no longer suffice to guarantee the necessary openness of access to digital data resources. Optimum access requires formal agreements on the conditions of access on the national and international levels.
The main task of establishing an adequate regulatory framework lies within the research community: the national research councils, institutes and funding agencies. But the general principles to build data access regimes should be a responsibility of governments. Considering the international dimensions of the scientific effort in general and of access to data in particular, national data access regimes will only work when closely connected to international agreements.

At the meeting at ministerial level of OECD's Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy on January 30, 2004, the ministers responsible for science policy endorsed a Declaration on Access to Research data from Public Funding including a draft set of principles and Guidelines. The Declaration will be an important step towards further international scientific co-operation.

___________________

Peter Shröder is co-ordinator for Information Policy at the Ministry of Education and Science in The Netherlands. He was co-chair of the OECD/CSTP Working Group led by Peter Arzberger that published the report "Promoting Promoting Access to Public Research Data for Scientific, Economic and Social Development" (2003).