The Case for International Sharing of Scientific Data: A Focus on Developing Countries: Proceedings of a Symposium (2012)

PART FIVE:
HOW TO IMPROVE DATA ACCESS AND USE

25. Government Science Policy Makers’ and Research Funders’ Challenges to International Data Sharing: The Role of UNESCO

Gretchen Kalonji UNESCO, France

I am going to offer you a very brief overview of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). I will give some examples of current activities that have to do with the challenges of data access and sharing, particularly in the developing world, and then proceed with some ideas about new opportunities and new directions that we might pursue in hopes of getting feedback from you and even perhaps forging new collaborations.

UNESCO was founded in 1949, and has an extraordinarily broad mandate covering education, science, and culture; communications and information; and ethics and philosophy. Such a broad mandate could be seen as a disadvantage, but within the context of the challenges that we are addressing at this meeting today, I hope to show you why this mandate may in fact be a very useful thing.

The organization has some strong existing programs within the natural sciences sector, in particular, the well-known Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and the International Hydrological Program. Both have been around for 50 or so years. We also have the ecological sciences with the Man and the Biosphere Program and the International Geosciences Program. What is perhaps less well known is our strong focus on indigenous knowledge and science policy. Science policy is one of our largest areas.

We are headquartered in Paris, but have science offices in Jakarta, Nairobi, Montevideo, Venice, and Cairo. We have science officers in about 53 UNESCO offices around the world. It is a strong, geographically distributed network with people on the ground actually working on projects.

UNESCO has a number of affiliated institutions, including our Category One Centers. The best known to this community is probably the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, but we also have an international hydrological education program in Delft, which is the world’s largest postgraduate freshwater program, with 80 percent of the students coming from the developing world. The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, TWAS, is also a UNESCO institution.

UNESCO also has what are called Category Two Centers, which are affiliated research centers established by our member states within a particular country and funded by that country. The country agrees that they will take on an international responsibility for a particular topic (e.g., water-based disasters, including one in Japan called ICHARM [International Center for Water Hazard]). We have about 22 of those in the sciences. Most are in water, and there are four new ones being established in Africa. Lastly, we have UNESCO Chairs around the world, which are appointed in a competitive process, and they are another wonderful resource for UNESCO.

One of the things that we have that is particularly important for the challenges we are discussing today are the extraordinary and very well-known World Heritage sites. They are designated for either cultural value, natural value, or both. In addition to the World Heritage sites, we have the biosphere reserves and the newly emerging geoparks, which are very popular in some countries, particularly China. Those are areas where a combination of research and education and community economic development can take place in an integrated manner.

We also have a network of affiliated partners. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research,¹

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¹ See http://public.web.cern.ch/public/.

was in fact created through UNESCO, and we continue to work very closely with them on issues such as digital access in Africa and physics education for teachers in Africa. The International Council for Science (ICSU) predates us but is a very close partner institution. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry is another partner. We are working very closely with them on the International Year of Chemistry. One of the things that is perhaps less well understood about UNESCO is the very close relationships we have with our member states. We are unique within the United Nations specialized agencies and programs in that we actually work in the same building in Paris as the permanent delegations from the member states, which enables a very close working relationship on concrete projects. We also have a structure that is unique within the UN system. The national commissions for UNESCO bring civil society together to help set directions for the organization. These commissions are more or less active. Korea, for example, has 600 people working on education, science, and culture, and UNESCO has become a household word there.

Lastly, we have perceived political neutrality. What that means is that we can convene discussions about topics that are quite thorny and have our 193 member states from around the world come together and discuss them in an amicable manner.

On the other hand, we could have a more strategic focus. We need to have a better working system of all of these various parts and partners; we need to work better with other UN agencies, the private sector, and other sectors of society; and we need to enhance our visibility.

Given these strengths and weaknesses, UNESCO’s science agenda should prioritize three things. First, we should help tackle problems that intrinsically require international cooperation and provide services for member states in that regard. Second, we should build on our original mandate. UNESCO was created with the slogan of building peace in the minds of men and women. We focus on those areas in which the science agenda interacts very closely with the issue of conflict prevention and conflict resolution. The broader agenda of peace is very dear to our hearts. I cite a couple of examples here. One is our work on transboundary aquifers, which I am going to talk about later in terms of large-scale data challenges. The other one is a fascinating effort called SESAME (International Center for Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East), which brings together scientists throughout the Middle East. It is a very important project in that it is putting together a synchrotron in Jordan and bringing together a scientific community from throughout the disciplines that can use this light source. It is an extraordinary example of scientists from a region with a huge amount of tension actually working together. Iranians, Israelis, Palestinians, Turkish, and so on are all working on the same large-scale science project.

Lastly, perhaps the bulk of our activity falls into serving the member states. We are international civil servants. We need to do the best job possible to help our member states reach their own goals for building scientific, technological, and innovation capacity in order to address poverty eradication and also provide the scientific basis for the solutions that are being proposed. Of course, we should continue to prioritize work in those areas where we have a lot of expertise, such as water.

At UNESCO, we have a unique view regarding the science and the development agendas. We have a very people-centered approach—an approach that is based on empowerment, ethics, and respect for local knowledge, but also our conviction that the ability to contribute to global challenges and the opportunities to do so are in fact fundamental human rights.

Since I joined UNESCO, we have melded our activities into a new strategic plan to be approved by our executive board next month. We have clustered our activities into two main areas, which I will talk about to show how the data challenges map onto some of these activities.

One area is strengthening science, technology, and innovation ecosystems. Societies have to have good policy, and we put an enormous amount of attention into that effort, particularly in Africa. Some of the symposium speakers have stressed that universities are really the heart of healthy technological innovation ecosystems. We have a big focus on higher education in the developing world, and on mobilizing the popular understanding and support for science, such as science for parliamentarians, science journalism, and working with science museums, as well as programs that enhance participation of indigenous people. To summarize, this cluster focuses on

The second cluster is mobilizing science for sustainability. This is an activity where large-scale scientific communities come together to set a collective scientific agenda.

I want to discuss a couple of examples for how these large-scale data issues become the actual work of our UNESCO family. In freshwater, UNESCO has the International Hydrological Program, which is an intergovernmental effort. Each nation has its own committee that works on setting a collective agenda in the area of freshwater. Then together they develop a 6-year plan that they modify over time. This is just one of the examples in which a community of hydrologists working together is trying to assemble the kind of data that we need. An example of the success of their work is in the transboundary aquifer in parts of the world, including Africa.

In this kind of an effort, UNESCO plays a coordinating and somewhat catalytic role, but basically there are multiples of hundreds of hydrologists around the world working on a common agenda. This is very important for avoiding conflict. Our connections with the UN system means that the scientists can work with the legal people in the United Nations and the diplomatic representatives to help forge the law in the general assembly concerning the equitable sharing of transboundary aquifers.

In the current work plan for freshwater intergovernmental science programs, there is a big emphasis on education, sustainability, basic sciences, and climate change. There are also cross-cutting programs, such as networks of hydrologists who work on a regional and global basis sharing data for hydrological research. For example, there is a Nile River basin group that brings together the scientists who are dealing with the Nile River water issues.

Another example of data sharing that is qualitatively different is the Man and the Biosphere Program. In this program, there are 564 sites in 109 countries. These sites are proposed by each country. There is an intergovernmental body that decides whether it can become a biosphere reserve. The interesting thing about the biosphere reserves is that, unlike the World Heritage sites, they involve a region that is protected because of biological diversity, but humans also live there. There is also a buffer zone surrounding the core region, and an extended zone. What that means is that activities such as mining, tourism, and farming are not forbidden. It gives scientists the opportunity to have some very vibrant case studies of the international balance between biodiversity conservation and economic development and livelihoods for local communities.

Let me briefly touch upon some other areas. UNESCO’s science policy activities range from international, like the World Science Report and the World Engineering Report, to regional and country-based policy support. Twenty-two countries in Africa are working with us right now on their science policies.

In the geological sciences, there are many examples in which the global change research community has been working together with a broader geological community, particularly the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), on getting access to and combining and sharing geological information from a variety of sources, including paper-based sources. It is a very exciting time now for the biodiversity community, too, and an intergovernmental platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services has been discussed. The biodiversity analog of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will undertake a very large-scale effort to promote access to data in the area of biodiversity. This is particularly exciting because of the newly created Nagoya Protocol for Access and Benefit Sharing.

There are three qualitative areas to which I believe UNESCO contributes. First, it helps strengthen the capacity of member states to engage in data-intensive science. Second, it provides platforms for more effective community engagement. Lastly, UNESCO enhances awareness of the value of freely sharing scientific data.

UNESCO could, if it is of interest to other partners to work with us, potentially host a meeting in Paris with our member states about the same topic, because they are the direct representatives to the government. They are the ones who need to hear the speeches like the one from Professor Yang about how wonderful it was for China to make data freely accessible.

My second idea is to incorporate within our existing efforts on strengthening higher education a collaboration on developing capacity in data-intensive science in partner universities, especially in Africa. It should be very straightforward to integrate awareness-raising activities into some of our existing efforts, like our work with ICSU in preparation for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), or programs on science for parliamentarians, or our work on policy.

Lastly, I am very excited about the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). It seems very likely that UNESCO, together with the UN Environment Programme and maybe another agency, will be taking the lead as the institutional cohost for IPBES. I would be interested in brainstorming with individuals or organizations about this extraordinary opportunity.

26. International Scientific Organizations: Views and Examples

Bengt Gustafsson Uppsala University, Sweden ICSU Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the Conduct of Science

I will begin with some historical remarks. History provides an enormous data bank, which is also useful when we discuss the accessibility of data banks in contemporary research. By starting the discussion by referring to the development in Europe some four to five hundred years ago, we find scientists quite often keeping their truths between themselves, and even sending cryptographic messages to each other to prevent others from reading or understanding. The interesting counter-examples in the early seventeenth century were the new artisans, the small factories, and the people developing technology for mining. They were open-minded, and symbolized modernity.

Openness was from the very beginning connected to the idea of progress—progress in arts and in building a new society. That was clear and strongly brought forward by Francis Bacon. Let me cite from an account of this by William Eamon in the Minerva article, From the Secrets of Nature to Public Knowledge: The Origins of the Concept of Openness in Science: “One of the lasting effects of the influence of Bacon’s philosophy was the establishment of a new model of the scientific research worker as one dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge for the public good. No longer was science to exist merely for the pleasure and illumination of a few minds; it was to be used for the advancement of commonwealth in general. This new demand required that more knowledge be shared, both within the scientific community and with society at large.”²

However, this was not the beginning; traditions along these lines existed before the Renaissance in Europe. But the ideas from Bacon’s time form the ideological tradition in which we scientists still live and work. This was also the spirit in which the Royal Society was formed in 1660, in fact, directly inspired by Bacon and his writing, and that also pursued the idea of transmitting publicly the findings by its Philosophical Transactions. There were many academies formed on this model. One was my own academy, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in the following century. The aim was to develop and spread knowledge in mathematics, natural sciences, economy, trade, useful arts, and manufacturing. There was also the idea of publishing descriptions of research achievements and creating a pregnant almanac containing advice for farmers and others, which was the second book printed in Swedish during more than 100 years. Only the Bible was read more than the Academy almanac.

These ideas are important cornerstones in the foundation of all academies still and also for the International Council for Science (ICSU), which has about 100 national members, most of them academies, as well as some international scientific unions. Since the 1930s, ICSU has built its activity on the Principle of the Universality of Science (Universality Principle). This principle is fundamental to scientific progress. According to the 5^th statute of ICSU, the principle involves freedom of movement, association, expression, and communication with scientists, as well as equitable access to data, information, and research materials. In pursuing its objectives for the rights and responsibilities of scientists, ICSU actively upholds this principle and, in so doing, opposes any discrimination on the basis of such factors as ethnic origin, religion, citizenship, language, political stance, gender, sexual orientation, or age. ICSU states that it shall not accept disruption of its own activities by statements or reactions that intentionally or otherwise prevent the application of this principle.

What can we do to uphold this principle in reality? ICSU has taken a number of steps for this, such as

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² Eamon, W (1985). From the Secrets of Nature to Public Knowledge: The Origins of the Concept of Openness in Science. Minerva 23, pp. 321-347.

establishing committees, including its current Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the Conduct of Science (CFRS). It is clear from the name of this committee that it has wide objectives, reflecting the view that the freedom advocated in the Universality Principle should also require that important responsibilities are taken by the scientific community relative to the society. In addition to this committee, ICSU has also taken other initiatives, which are directed more particularly toward securing data distribution and data accessibility, such as initiating a Strategic Coordinating Committee on Information and Data, looking at the interaction of the World Data System, the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), and other ICSU data- and information-related activities. ICSU has also cooperated with other organizations in forming an International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications.

The CFRS discusses and takes stands against breaches of the Universality Principle. This is often done in collaboration with several other organizations, in particular, the members of ICSU. Another important collaborator is the International Human Rights Network of Academies and Scholarly Societies. The CFRS advises ICSU and ICSU members on related matters and helps arrange conferences and workshops on issues of responsibility and integrity of science. In doing so, it is important for the committee to also try to reach conclusions; after such workshops and conferences, conclusions are published as statements or advisory notes. Some recent examples, in addition to this workshop, is a workshop on access and benefit sharing of genetic resources held in Berne in June 2011, as well as one on private sector–academia interaction in November 2011 in Sigtuna, Sweden. Other workshops are planned on science policy advice, science and antiscience, and science in contemporary wars. All these workshops must be truly international and will have a focus on the balance of responsibility and freedom in science.

Now, turning more particularly toward the question of access to scientific data, it must be stressed that the present situation, although improving, is far from satisfactory. As Paul Uhlir pointed out in a 2010 essay in the CODATA Data Science Journal, there are still “information gulags,” that is, large numbers of data resources in dark repositories; “intellectual straitjackets,” exclusive property protection of data when not needed; as well as “memory holes,” meaning that data once collected are often later destroyed or not conserved properly³. Existing data are most often not properly archived. Even quite important data are not maintained. Early National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data are examples of this.

Let me now focus on my own field, astronomy, and provide several examples to show the progress in openness, with a more historical twist than that of the stimulating presentation by Željko Ivezić. A famous example of secrecy in science is the behavior of Galileo Galilei when he summarized his pioneering telescopic studies of the planet Saturn in the early 1610s. He did not interpret what he saw as a ring system, since there seemed to be two bodies on either side of the planet, or possibly “ears” on the planet. Yet, to claim his discovery in spite of the uncertain interpretation, he used an anagram (when deciphered indicating that the planet “had triple form”) as a form of commitment scheme. Not until several decades later, Christian Huygens correctly identified the ring system and announced its existence.

Twice a century, Venus passes across the solar disk; the first detailed European observations of this phenomenon were made in 1639. James Gregory next proposed that a method could be developed to find the distance to the sun by timing exactly when Venus enters the solar disk and when it leaves the disk. If that is done from several places on Earth, the distance to the sun could be determined accurately. Edmond Halley proposed that astronomers should observe the Venus transits systematically next time, which happened to be after his death in 1742. Astronomers traveled to various parts of the world to measure the transits of Venus accurately. The first passage was in 1761. There were even measurements made from a

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³ Uhlir, P. (2010, October 7). Information Gulags, Intellectual Straightjackets, and Memory Holes: Three Principles to Guide the Preservation of Scientific Data, CODATA. Data Science Journal, 9.

naval frigate while fighting pirates in the Mediterranean. The data were then assembled, shared among a network of astronomers, and made common.

During the event 8 years later, astronomers were even better spread across the globe, including a British expedition on Tahiti where young James Cook was sent with his vessel to carry out the observations. His observations turned out to be rather poor. The excuse given by Cook was that the quadrant was robbed by a local chief and dismantled, and then only provisionally mended. On his way back, however, he discovered some new regions of the earth and reported this back to the admiralty, and they forgave him explicitly for his bad observations. The data were assembled and discussed among the astronomers, because they did not have the quality expected—the distance calculated by Jérôme Lalande in Paris was 153 million kilometers plus 1 million kilometers, which was not as good as they had hoped for. This very problem of coordinating all observations and minimizing the errors led to requirements for further openness.

Another great international project from the following century was the great star map, Carte du Ciel, where 22 observatories joined in constructing rather similar telescopes, which together exposed 22,000 photographic glass plates with 4.6 million stars to be measured and printed. Many people, including non-expert women, were engaged in these activities. The whole result was published in 254 volumes. Again, the need to reach the goal required wide international collaboration, and to achieve optimal quality, openness was necessary. This experience that such ventures must be carried out in common, not only to make the heavy workload possible but also to achieve an optimal analysis of the data, demonstrated to the astronomy community the importance of sharing data.

In contemporary astronomy we find this intimate collaboration taking place not only in discussing the data or sharing data but also in the very setting up of projects and determining how to analyze the data, how to release them, how to publicize them, and how to provide assistance so as to allow as many people as possible to contribute. At many of the largest international telescope facilities, financed by consortia with universities or states as members, nonmember astronomers may take part, and in some cases even be principal investigators (PIs) on projects. At least in principle, only excellence of the project proposal matters. Finally, in most cases, all data are made fully public after about 1 year.

We can compare this situation with CERN, the European high-energy physics laboratory at Geneva. Nonmember state PIs work there and are playing important roles. CERN also runs an open fellowship program, to which scientists from all over the world are encouraged to come and team up with others. Some primary data are available from earlier experiments, but the recent ones, including the Large Hadron Collider experiments, will probably not be available publicly, just because they are so extensive. It is very hard to interpret them without being a member of the experimental group. In this case the enormous database of primary data may still be closed.

Astronomers produced a data manifesto 5 years ago, which was later adopted by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). It starts with this declaration: “We, the global community of astronomy, aspire to the following guidelines for managing astronomical data, believing that these guidelines would maximize the rate and cost effectiveness of science discovery.”⁴ Relevant guidelines include: “All significant tables and images published in journals should appear in astronomical data centers. All data obtained with publicly funded observatories should after proprietary periods be placed in public domain. In any new major astronomical construction project, the data processing, storage, migration and management requirements should be built in at an early stage in the project and budgeted along with other parts of the project. Astronomers in all countries should have the same access to astronomical data and information. Legacy astronomical data can be valuable and high-priority legacy data should be preserved

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⁴ Available at http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/rnorris/papers/manifesto.pdf

and stored in digital form in the data centers. IAU should work with other international organizations to achieve our common goals and learn from our colleagues in other fields.” Legacy astronomical data refers to older data. For instance, the glass plates mentioned above can be valuable and even high-priority legacy data, and they should therefore be preserved and stored in digital form in the data centers.

Implementing such a manifesto is, of course, a major undertaking. One important initiative along these lines is the International Virtual Observatory Alliance, which is a worldwide organization of national members, which tries to make all astronomical observational data in various wavelength bands from various instruments available publicly. Several international astronomical data centers also play a great role in these endeavors.

Such efforts to promote openness are not only for generosity. There have been studies showing that the open data policy of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has increased the number of publications based on HST data by a factor of 3, and that the earlier satellite telescope International Ultraviolet Explorer has increased the number of publications based on those data by a factor of 5. Another important issue on openness is open-access publications. Most astronomy papers can now be accessed freely via a preprint database or archive (Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System), and most major journals accept this way of prepublication.

Let me also comment on the problem of overcoming the digital divide. There are several concrete examples of attempts within the scientific communities in particular fields to bridge the gap between the developed and the developing world in this respect. In astronomy, this bridging has partly been driven by the important fact that many of the best astronomical sites are situated in developing countries. The IAU has recently established an office for astronomy development in the developing countries at the South African Astronomical Observatory. The experience at the International Science Programs at Uppsala University, which has been actively bridging between university science departments in the developing world and in the Nordic countries for 50 years, shows that much can be done to diminish the digital divide with patience and consistency.

No doubt, astronomy is a simple example with a long tradition of international collaboration and openness. Astronomers have realized that international collaboration is necessary, because the universe is large and rich in a multitude of various phenomena. Astronomy has limited economic impact and interest and few security restrictions. And it is mainly motivated by the interest of the public, which after all have to pay for it, and is why openness is necessary. So, astronomy is a simple case. Nevertheless, we may learn from it. There is a full chain of openness aspects in the scientific process to be considered. Can we be open in project planning, letting people team up whenever they want in the process? Can we be open in planning our big investments, building our telescopes, our accelerators, and our big projects? Can we be open in data analysis even before we have published the data, and open in data use too? I think so. Our science will benefit from openness in all these respects.

We can learn from history that much of science is primarily not driven by scientists, but by society. However, almost all science is also science driven. There are good reasons, both from a scientific point of view and from a societal one, for promoting better science by being open. We also can learn from examples of several of the presentations during this symposium that individuals matter.

By opening up internationally together, we actually can provide something even more important than pure science to the world—namely, demonstrate that together we can do very difficult things. Previously, we have mostly demonstrated this by way of war operations in big international collaborations, but here we can do it with more lasting value. Can we afford to continue losing more than half of all human capacity that would wish and be able to contribute important scientific achievements? Of course not. That is the basic motivation for all these endeavors.

Let me end with a quote that very appropriately is presented as an inscription on the Keck Building, 500 Fifth Street, N.W., where this meeting takes place:

27. Improving Data Access and Use for Sustainable Development in the South

Daniel Schaffer Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, Italy

I am speaking on behalf of TWAS, the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World. I will explain what TWAS is, in brief, later in the presentation. At the outset, my talk will focus on both scientific information and scientific data. I will speak about key issues raised during this 2-day symposium, but with a TWAS twist and a particular focus on broad-based problems faced by scientists in the developing world who are seeking to access scientific information and scientific data.

A world-class technical library can be found on the campus of the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, where TWAS is also located. When ICTP was created in the 1960s, the library was the centerpiece of the enterprise. Scientists from across the developing world would come to ICTP for the library, since it was unlikely they could get the information at institutions in their home countries. Of course, they would also come to participate in ICTP’s research and training activities.

The library is still there, but scientists can now often access much of the library’s material from anywhere. The shift that has taken place at ICTP, I believe, is symbolic of the broad changes that have occurred in scientific information and data access across the world.

My presentation will be framed by the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that everyone has the right to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. The members of the United Nations signed this declaration in 1947. To that end, there is a long-standing principled foundation to the quest for free and open access to information and data.

As we all know, the number of scholarly and scientific publications are increasing at a rapid rate. It is estimated that there are 25,000 to 50,000 scholarly publications worldwide. Some 2.5 million scholarly articles are published each year. It is estimated that the output is doubling every 15 years. Scientific information is experiencing its greatest transformation since the advent of the printing press more than five centuries ago, and what is true of scientific information is equally true of scientific data. In 2010 it is estimated that the world generated 1,250 exabytes of data. If you placed that data inside a conventional compact disk (CD) and you stacked those CDs one atop another, the stack would rise 3.75 million kilometers, a distance equal to five times to the moon and back. We are generating additional information at such a rapid pace, this year alone we will be producing 1,800 exabytes of data. That means there would be several more stacks of CDs rising to incredible heights.

Some of the problems in communications exist despite the enormous flow of information and data, and some exist because of the endless flow of information and data. For example, there are still some fundamental obstacles that stand in the way of the use, interpretation, and exchange of information and data. Many of these challenges have been mentioned over the course of the past day and a half. Some are universal. The data deluge itself presents an enormous data management problem. Security issues exist at both national and international levels. There are also privacy issues, particularly related to data on public health and medical research. What has not been mentioned extensively here is the reluctance to share data. As we all know, the international scientific community is based on competition and individual accomplishment. That often leads to reluctance on the part of scientists to share data.

Some of the challenges are particular to the developing world. As we heard in the first session today, in poor countries, there is often poor Internet access, limited access to computers themselves, and low bandwidth. It is much less of a problem than it was 10 or even 5 years ago, but it still persists in parts of

the developing world. There is also limited access to scientific literature. Historically this has been due to the cost of subscriptions, but we have shifted the burden from institutions to individuals through open access, which has admittedly been an important engine for the spread of scientific information and advances in scientific capacity in the developing world. Nevertheless, open access presents some problems for individual scientists, particularly young scientists.

Last year, TWAS held a conference in Egypt in partnership with the New Alexandria Library on scientific publications. Many of the young scientists who participated in the conference complained about open access because they simply did not have the resources to participate. Charges of $1,000–$1,500 U.S. dollars in author fees to publish in an open-access journal are beyond their means. Indeed it exceeds their yearly salaries. As a result, they do have problems with contributing to and accessing open-access materials, despite all of the benefits that open access provides.

Additionally, there is inadequate training for gathering and interpreting data, poorly equipped laboratories, excessive teaching responsibilities that distract researchers from their research, limited career opportunities that dampen enthusiasm for research, and a general lack of funding. TWAS did a survey about 2 years ago asking young scientists in the developing world, particularly poorer countries in the South, what their research environment was like and what kinds of issues they confronted. We received an e-mail from one scientist in Nigeria, where she had a list of problems with which we are all familiar. I would like to point to the opening and closing paragraphs of her e-mail to highlight the realities those scientists in her circumstances face. She wrote: “For the past 3 hours, I have been trying to reply to your email, but the power has been going off and on every minute.” And the last sentence reads: “I cut my discussion short because I need to send this message now before the power goes off.” That is the reality that many young scientists face in poor developing countries.

Despite these challenges, there are some—in fact, many—encouraging developments. Two reports published recently indicated that the trends are positive for capacity building and access to scientific publications and scientific data collection in the developing world. These reports are the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Science Report⁵, published in 2010, and the Royal Society’s Knowledge, Networks and Nations⁶, published in March 2011.

The UNESCO report indicated that over the past decade, there has been a substantial increase (from 30 percent in 2002 to 38 percent today) in the number of publications by scientists from the South published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Yet much of this growth has been due to a very small number of countries. According to surveys done by TWAS, six countries (China, India, South Korea, Brazil, Taiwan, and Turkey) in the global South are responsible for 75 percent of the publications that are being produced in the developing world.

We should note that some of these countries are no longer considered developing (e.g., China is both a developing and a developed country, and South Korea is defined as a high-income developed country in most economic surveys and reports). China, in fact, is now playing a role in the South similar to that played by the United States in the world, in the sense that it is producing 25 percent to 30 percent of all the journal publications in the developing world.

According to the Royal Society’s Knowledge, Networks and Nations⁷, China is on course to overtake the United States in scientific output, possibly as soon as 2013, which is far earlier than expected. Leaving aside the question of impact and overall quality, for sheer quantity, within the next 2 or 3 years, Chinese

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⁵ Available at http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/science-technology/prospective-studies/unesco-science-report/

⁶ Available at http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/knowledge-networks-nations/report/

⁷ Available at http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/knowledge-networks-nations/report/

scientists will likely outpace scientists in the United States in the number of scientific publications they publish.

So, on one side of the spectrum, we have six “developing” countries that are responsible for three-quarters of scientific publications in the developing world. On the other side of the spectrum, we have a group of 80 developing countries that produce very small quantities of scientific information. These countries are home to 1.6 billion people, 25 percent of the world’s population. They are responsible for less than 1 percent of the world’s scientific publications. Many of these countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.

We have heard examples of superior science being done in the South, and this is undoubtedly true, but the aggregate figures indicate that there is also a growing gap in scientific publications between countries such as China and India, which are progressing rapidly, and others that are lagging farther and farther behind. From TWAS’s perspective, one of the key questions about scientific information and scientific data is, How do you deal with these two divergent trends—a narrowing North-South divide that is being matched by a widening South-South divide?

Let me spend a few minutes now talking about TWAS, the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World. Abdus Salam, the Nobel laureate from Pakistan, founded TWAS in 1983 in Trieste, Italy. The secretary general of the United Nations inaugurated the Academy in 1985. It operates under the administrative umbrella of UNESCO. It began with 40 members. It now has 995 members from nearly 100 developing countries: 853 fellows in 74 countries in the South, 142 associate fellows in 17 countries in the North. Fifteen Nobel laureates are TWAS members.

Some of the Academy members may be familiar to you. There is Atta-ur-Rahman, who spoke to the participants at this meeting yesterday from Pakistan via cyberspace. There is Mohamed Hassan, who just stepped down as the TWAS executive director, and the new executive director who was previously on the council, Romain Murenzi. He more recently worked with the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

The objectives of TWAS are to:

Our activities include sponsoring a South-South postgraduate and postdoctoral training fellowship program that we conduct in partnership with such large and increasingly successful developing countries as Brazil, China, India, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, and Thailand. We award 175 fellowships per year. Developing countries provide the funding for local expenses and tuition. TWAS provides the funding for transportation to enable these young scientists from the poor developing countries to go to centers of excellence and universities in the host countries. We also have a research grants program for individual scientists, comprising relatively small grants of $15,000, largely used for purchasing equipment and supplies. Despite their modest size, these grants have a great deal of credibility, and they are well known among scientists in the developing world.

We also support institutions. We have a grants program for research groups in poor developing countries. We provide the groups with $30,000 a year over a 3-year period (subject to an annual performance review). These groups have shown much fortitude, ingenuity, and progress in doing research under very

difficult conditions, and this money can make a big difference in the quality of their research going forward.

Furthermore, in recognition of the growing capacity of scientific expertise and excellence in the South, we have established, over the course of the past decades, five regional offices. The goal is to develop these regional offices into mini TWAS’s that can address within their own regions many of the same issues that TWAS does across the South.

Given what I have said about TWAS, and given the trend toward a widening South-South gap in scientific capacity, how can we manage the growth of data and information for the benefit of all developing countries? It is a key question for TWAS and a key question for most of the members of this audience.

I am going to make a number of recommendations. The good news is these are not radically new ideas. Many of the recommendations have been discussed here. In fact, the recommendations are largely in line with many of the activities, programs, and initiatives that you are involved in. The recommendations also represent a strategy, in the TWAS context, to make them more encompassing so that they do not focus solely on successful developing countries at the expense of developing countries that are not fully participating in international science. I therefore support the following recommendations:

All of these modest recommendations, which are largely based on existing activities, experiences, and initiatives that have been mentioned at this meeting, can play a critical role in fulfilling the principles and goals articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with its lofty assertion that everyone has the right to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

They could also play a critical role in fulfilling the grand vision of Abdus Salam, creator of ICTP and TWAS, who often said in his writings and his speeches, “Scientific thought is the common heritage of mankind.”

28. How to Improve Data Access and Use: An Industry Perspective

John Rumble Information International Associates, United States

The focus of my talk is on how to improve data access and use from an industrial perspective. I work for a private company now, but I worked for the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) for many years. During that time, one of my main responsibilities was to run the Standard Reference Data Program at NIST’s scientific and technical laboratories. Many of those data programs are run in cooperation and partnership with, as well as with direct funding from, industry. A lot of my perspective arises from my experience in working with various types of industries—from the biotechnology industry hoping to capitalize on genomics, to the concrete industry hoping to be able to build and pave roads in subfreezing weather, to the aircraft industry hoping to take advantage of new composite materials instead of good old-fashioned aluminum.

There are a lot of common features in the way that industry approaches, accesses, uses, and supports data that are useful to it. It is important then to understand how industry looks upon publicly funded data. Just to give you the point of this in advance, industry strongly applauds the open access to publicly funded data because industry is in the best position to take advantage of data from an exploitation point of view, not for scientific credit, but for revenue credit. The more data they have access to, the more comfortable a company is that it is doing things in the best possible way.

It is always useful to look at the life cycle of data. When we talk about access to data, we are really talking about one part of a multistep, continuous process. It starts with measurements and works its way around to having data resources being available and then having people use them. Then, from the use of these data resources, new needs are developed that in turn generate new measurements. This is how the data life cycle process continues.

I want us to think about this particular life cycle from the industrial perspective to see where the interactions of industry take place within this life cycle and to understand some of the places where industry can both help and take advantage of the accessibility of data. Many people do not really realize that industry plays a major role today in a lot of large scale data collection efforts, whether it be the large-scale manufacturer of small instruments that are used over and over again, such as mass spectrometers, genome sequencers, and crystallographic structure machines or all the way up to the big new colliders that have been built with a lot of cooperation from industry. Industry does play a large role in generating data, even publicly funded data, through this support of the scientific effort and through instrumentation. They are looking to make money, but I think it is important to realize that a lot of the sources of publicly funded data resources that have been built in recent years have come as a direct result of industry involvement in this part of the data cycle.

There are situations where industry gets very interested in the development of and access to data resources. Sometimes it comes in terms of direct financial support. Good examples are some of the genomic and proteomic databases that are being built where industrial firms are directly doing measurements and contributing them to larger scale data resources. Strategic moral support in the protein data bank is a good example of where industry does not necessarily provide direct support, but they have strongly encouraged the U.S. government to continue long-term support of that resource.

The knowledge support services that some of the best data scientists have developed in terms of designing data architecture, data resources, and web services came from IBM, Microsoft, and now Google. In other situations, where there are not particularly large sets of tools or methodologies to exploit data, industry does a lot of development in terms of data mining, visualization, and what I call “value added”. This is

where industry will take some publicly available data, add value to it, and then sell it. An example is the NIST mass spectral database, which contains several hundred thousand mass spectra. NIST distributes this database with a nice interface, but some of the machine manufacturers have taken that product and added an analytical package on top of it, thus enhancing the value of that publicly funded data resource by making it a more important scientific and technological tool.

Finally, one other way that industry very importantly involves itself in the data life cycle is by articulating new needs. Those of you from university research programs are well aware that industry has started many academic-industry joint programs. These programs have been started because industry realizes it has need for new scientific knowledge and measurements that it cannot satisfy itself.

Another important main point has to do with how industry accesses data and when it accesses them, why it accesses them, and the economic implications of its access. Almost any product and service that is available commercially starts as a concept. It might simply be one entrepreneur sitting at a restaurant sketching something, or the result of a long process by a complex design team. What is important to understand is when industry makes money. Industry does not make money from concepts or rough designs; it makes money from selling things.

The main point I want to make here is that the industry’s willingness to pay for data is directly related to how close in time the use of data are to the sale of a product or service. Data used years before a product is released and sold is not “valued” as highly as are data whose use has immediate impact. An example of the latter is analytical chemistry data that are used to identify an unknown substance that has affected a manufacturing process. Because the impact is immediate, companies are willing to pay many thousands of dollars for data. In contrast, companies are less willing to pay for material property data used early in a multi-year design database.

The picture I am trying to paint here is that industry needs to have access to all kinds of different data to support product development and services so they can make money. Data comes in lots of different flavors and has lots of different uses. Data also has differing impacts on the ability of industry to make money from data use depending on when that use occurs. Industry is willing to pay for data when it perceives the value of those data in helping them make more money.

What really incentivizes industry to participate more willingly in scientific data activities? How do we improve access to data? There are situations where industry’s participation in scientific data activities is extremely important to the progress of those scientific data activities. Obviously the first example that comes to mind is genomics, but genetically modified foods are another case. Other examples are pharmaceutical development, and aircraft manufacturing.

The primary motivation is the potential for increased revenue. Rarely do companies act out of goodwill. If we want industry participation in more public scientific data activities, it is perfectly acceptable to allow them to demand a business case and for you to provide that business case to them, because that is how industry makes decisions. There are subsidiary reasons, such as intellectual property rights, which eventually translate into increased revenue or increased market share. A company will support a data project if it leads to development of a new product, for example, a specific new pharmaceutical, such as a new drug for diabetes, which in turn will lead to increased revenue.

There are other less tangible ways that are also useful to think about. One is that there are many smart people in industry, and they know that new science is going to create new industry and new products. They are not sure how, and if they participate in the fundamental research that develops these scientific disciplines, they will have an opportunity to perhaps get the insights that will lead to revenue. The professional societies in the United States have incentivized industry to cooperate together. A lot of the

large-scale data programs are funded by industry through professional society programs.

I would like to end by saying that contrary to what most people think, industry really supports open access to publicly funded data. From their perspective, they are often in the best position to exploit them for whatever reasons they want to. If industry have data that it generated, there are many mechanisms to keep that proprietary data to themselves. As I already indicated, however, there are instances when they do generate data or do help the generation of data, which contributes considerably to publicly funded data resources.

29. Production and Access to Scientific Data in Africa: A Framework for Improving the Contribution of Research Institutions

Hilary I. Inyang African Continental University System Initiative⁸ University of North Carolina, Charlotte, United States

INTRODUCTION

To begin, I would like to describe the role of universities during three eras in Africa. The first was the pre-independence era in Africa when universities were engaged very deeply in independence movements, protests, and so forth. In Mozambique, for example, university-based intellectuals were at the forefront of protests to gain independence from the Portuguese government. At that time, African universities were at the vanguard of diverse indigenous groups that rationalized the need for the independence of African countries on the basis of the human rights to freedom and self-governance. They were not really deep contributors of data or other forms of information to economic development initiatives and governance of their countries. That role was played by colonial governments directed from Europe. This circumstance was prevalent in Africa until the late 1950s.

The 1960s, when the wind of change blew across Africa bringing with it independence, was another significant period with respect to the availability of data in Africa for national economic development programs of newly independent nations. The first set of post-independence leaders in Africa were statesmen, exemplified by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Dr. Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Dr. Siaka Stevens of Sierra Leone, Dr. Leopold Sedhar Senghor of Senegal, Dr. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria. Most of them were western-educated and valued good education, as well as the need to develop and use data for their governments’ economic planning and governance. The high educational standards of the era are highlighted by the fact that despite the existence of very few research institutes within the continent at that time, colleges were able to engage in intellectual enquiry to generate data and build human capacity on analytical aspects of economic program planning and implementation. However, during that era, universities were strong in the liberal arts, but not so much in the sciences, because they had not yet developed the infrastructure that would have made them competitive with those in global science.

Unfortunately, following their initial interest in democracy and the utility of knowledge systems, including data in the sustainable development of their countries, most of the early leaders overstayed their welcome in leadership positions and sometimes, turned to autocracy. The ultimate result was a wave of military coup d’états across Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, that derailed most of the long-term educational and research initiatives that would have institutionalized the generation of data for economic planning and project implementation in Africa. Most of the new military leaders installed autocracies that devalued knowledge systems and operated through edicts without regard to scientific facts and data that were not in support of their decisions. Intellectuals were often prosecuted and many were driven into exile.

Since the 1990s, there has been a continuing diminution of autocracy in Africa. The need for national planning is recognized. Most African countries have 5-year national development programs, and they are beginning to realize that this is the time to extract the intellect of their people and invest such intellect in development efforts. This era has also witnessed the emergence of continental knowledge systems consortia, professional organizations and academic institutions that target the generation of knowledge and information. Examples are: the four-campus African University of Science and Technology, the Pan African University System, and continental professional societies in virtually every major scientific field.

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⁸ Former president of the African Continental University System Initiative.

Organizations such as International Council for Science – Regional Office for Africa (ICSU-ROA) and UNESCO have embarked on science support activities that will also generate data. An example is the ICSU-ROA Science Plans in many thematic areas that are critical to Africa’s sustainable development. Requirements for improvements of data generation, management, and utilization systems in Africa should be viewed within the context described above.

THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE GENERATION INSTITUTIONS IN DATA PRODUCTION AND MANAGEMENT

What are the typical roles of universities and other institutions that are engaged in research? I see such roles to be the following:

The last one often puts universities in conflict with political authorities. Every dictator that shows up wants to imprison journalists and professors. Let me start by addressing some problems. There are some very large projects in Africa. Development banks such as the World Bank and the African Development Bank sponsor most of these projects. Very large companies, more recently large Chinese companies, also sponsor such big projects. A main problem with these initiatives (e.g., building a dam or developing a big mining facility) is that there are no clear requirements regarding post-project use of the data and information that they generate for other sustainable development programs of the host countries. Then, of course, there is the issue of sensitive information and how to deal with it.

Also, there is the need for coordination and collaboration. For example, most of the African countries have declared a set of activities to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, which are very specific. All of these activities will require data and other types of information for planning and implementation of projects. This is why I see that there is a need for a systematic relationship between data access programs and these efforts.

CAPACITY LIMITATIONS OF AFRICAN COUNTRIES

Furthermore, there is the issue of the resource and human capacity gaps among African countries. It is not that information is sparse in all parts of Africa on every issue. In some countries like South Africa, Tunisia and Algeria, there is a lot of information, but some countries in West Africa and Central Africa do not have adequate facilities and capabilities for research information generation on critical issues in many economic sectors. About 30 percent of the annual budget of some of these poor countries comes as foreign aid. They have other things that they consider more immediate and more expedient than developing research facilities and data management systems.

Additionally, we should always remember that Africa has a number of official languages. So, it is very difficult to do things on a region-wide basis. Even in West Africa, there are 5 Anglophone and 9 Francophone countries. In Central Africa, French and Portuguese are used, and in Equatorial Guinea, Spanish is used. Translation of documents and real-time oral speeches can be very expensive.

The level of investment in data generation activities is very limited in African countries. In fact, the entire African investment in this area is less than that of Israel. Currently, there are about 500 science parks worldwide, but less than 2 percent of those parks are in Africa. If those parks are absent, how will data be transferred or managed as we do here in places like the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina or Silicon Valley in California? There should be a clear model for how universities can interrelate with other

organizations to promote economic activities and progress. This has to be promoted through, for example, the activities of organizations like the World Bank, the African Development Bank, UNESCO, ICSU, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the African Union, the Regional Economic Blocs, and international aid organizations, as well as the African governments themselves.

PROPOSED SOLUTIONS

What are the solutions? We need to establish an African Research Foundation. Most of the efforts and money that have been spent would be better spent on the development of this critical entity. Even in Europe, where there are very strong national science or research foundations, there is still the superposition of the European Science Foundation on a continental basis, on those national capabilities. I think it is very critical to do this in Africa as well, more so when the lack of effective national research agencies is pervasive in the continent, except of course, in South Africa. An endowment fund should be attached to such an endeavor, because if there is a research foundation, it would be ineffective, if it does not have the funds to deal with issues.

As in most countries, universities in Africa emphasize three broad research disciplines: the social sciences and humanities; engineering, technology and computing sciences; and physical, biological, ecological, and other natural sciences. In parallel, governments employ a variety of policy tools: market incentives, risk communication, technology deployment, public education, and so forth. Unless there is an interplay between these academic approaches and government policies and initiatives, it is very difficult to maximize the value of data, information, science, and public policy.

I would like to address some important developments in Africa in the information technology area. There are many optical cable systems that are being implemented now in Africa. These cable systems are improving internet access in Africa. For example, the West African Cable System is reducing the cost of Internet connectivity, including access and data transfer, and mobile systems. As a complement to this development, there are about 10 satellite systems now covering various regions, including sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab countries in the north of Africa.

CONCLUSIONS

Let me conclude by stating that the formation and operation of an African Research Foundation would greatly enhance the generation of data and other types of information for regional sustainable development. Such a Foundation should have the following mandate:

• To support research for production of information, including data, for use in African sustainable development programs;

• To provide an opportunity for engagement of African and other experts and the development of African talent (in Africa and the diaspora) on science and technology research on critical issues that affect Africa; and

• To catalyze science and technology-based African entrepreneurship and improve the infrastructure for access to data in locations within and outside Africa.

If these recommendations are implemented, Africa will increase its contribution of knowledge, not only to the improvement of the quality of life in the continent, but to global sustainable development. It is a fact of history that the continent has a heritage of contributions to human development and on intellectual matters throughout the centuries.

30. The ICSU World Data System

Yasuhiro Murayama National Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Japan

My talk will include both international activities related to ICSU’s World Data System, as well as some examples of scientific database and data sharing activities related to developing countries, especially in Asian countries. I hope that the specific examples I will share with you can inspire you to promote more open access data for social benefits.

About 50 years ago, when the former “World Data Center” (WDC) system was established, the main objective was data preservation primarily for printed data sheets and films, before digital data become predominant with state-of-art technology of high-speed Internet, and huge data storage in computer servers. Those were valuable efforts to keep scientific data indispensible. Today, we get more and more data in digital form, and the size of the holdings is increasing rapidly. In Japan, other Asian countries, the United States, and Europe, we are expanding our data strategies, and scientists are concerned with how to handle the data influx. Also with digital data, the future interoperability for world-wide data centers connecting to each other can be envisioned, which was not available for data stored on paper and film.

In this context, the International Council for Science (ICSU) established the World Data System (WDS) in 2008. ICSU envisioned a global data system that would:

I should mention that CODATA has also participated in such international data sharing efforts, and we are hoping for more future collaboration with CODATA. Other collaborators come from the disaster research area. We also have collaborations with international scientific unions, a number of United Nations agencies, and additional Asian and Japanese unions.

To fulfill this vision and to facilitate collaboration, I am now in process of establishing a new International Programme Office (IPO) for ICSU-WDS this year, as its acting director. The IPO is to be hosted by the National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT) in Japan (NB: the internationally selected Executive Director was appointed in March 2012, and the official opening ceremony was held in Tokyo, in May 2012).

Next, I would like to address several scientific data activities carried out by myself and my institute. We have a monitoring network for solar and space science, and space weather observational data. These kind of data are important in social activities too; for example, the ionosphere is the biggest delay factor in radio navigation signals for the Global Positioning System (GPS). This is very crucial in positioning aircraft and in future precise applications.

If we want to introduce GPS-guided aircraft navigation, the networks should extend into the south Asian countries and be based upon sound science where data are shared together with those countries. Many cities also provide this kind of distributed system and use high-speed internet to link with several Japanese universities.

Future directions include scientific data cloud services, or creating a digital Earth capability that combines observational data and simulation data with informatics technologies. Better management of the data can be enabled through high-speed research network experiments, such as the Asian-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN). This kind of infrastructure enables Japanese researchers to access data from various countries in eastern and southern Asia and vice versa.

A final example focuses on university groups in Japan. They are now designing a metadata system for space and atmospheric, and interdisciplinary sciences. An improved metadata system enables more information exchanges to promote data usage and more scientific research. Universities also have various data observing networks. Some are radars in Arctic regions, while others are radars or magnetometers in Asian countries or in Antarctic stations. The starting point is a good metadata system for data in the archives.

I would like to conclude by noting that in September 2011 we will have the first World Data System conference in Kyoto, together with the WDS scientific committee meeting.

31. Libraries and Improving Data Access and Use in Developing Regions

Stephen Griffin National Science Foundation, United States

I am going to explore some of the potential roles for libraries in improving access, use and sharing of large stores of data in support of e-Science and other data-intensive scholarly inquiry. The focus will be on their application in developing countries.

Contemporary research and scholarship is increasingly characterized by the use of large-scale datasets and computationally intensive tasks. Vast amounts of data are used by scientists to better map the cosmos, build more accurate earth system models, examine in finer details the structures of living organisms, and gain insights into the behaviors of societies and individuals in a complex world increasingly dependent upon information technology.

Significantly, more humanists are rapidly integrating newly digitized corpora, digital surrogates of cultural heritage artifacts, and historical, spatial, and temporal indexed data into their scholarly endeavors. The datasets are huge by any measure. Petabyte-scale datasets are not uncommon. More raw data are being produced today than can be physically stored, and this disparity will almost certainly increase very rapidly.

Much has been accomplished by the libraries and information sciences communities over the past decade to establish basic principles, standards, object representations, descriptive metadata, and reference models needed to achieve interoperability, scalability, access, and long-term preservation and archiving of digital content.

Already, libraries have undergone significant transformation by converting collections and holdings to digital forms in prescribed formats with appropriate descriptive metadata. In addition, they have dealt with a deluge of new “born digital” data from a variety of sources. Libraries now play a central role in providing enhanced access to very large digital collections across many topic domains for a wide variety of users, but the prospect of libraries taking responsibility for large-scale raw datasets and a multitude of derivative forms of data associated with e-Science and data-intensive scholarship was not seriously considered until more recently. As a result, there is lively debate and controversy over how libraries, and particularly research libraries, should participate in providing tools and infrastructure in support of data-intensive research.

The challenges are daunting. In addition to tasks inherent in the life cycle of data and information, there are other tasks requiring new technologies and new expertise and a broader spectrum of user services. This points to the question of how graduate schools of library and information science should prepare students for the realities that await them in a digital world of knowledge resources.

For developing countries, all of that applies, but there are additional barriers that are not present in more-developed regions of the world. At the same time, perhaps there are unique opportunities that we can discover, as in some respect they are beginning at a different starting point in a long evolutionary process and may not be burdened by entrenched practices.

There are several points in Figure 31-1 that depicts the rapid transition from storing information on analog media to digital media. It is impressive how quickly it happened, and perhaps a bit disconcerting, too. Also, it should be noted that scientific data only represents a very small proportion of the data being produced, and all data of value require careful management to ensure reusability. Of equal importance is that the various media on which the data are stored deteriorates over time and will likely become

unreadable within a few decades. This implies that policies for physical migration be established and followed.

FIGURE 31-1 The World’s Capacity to Store Information

Credit: Hilbert, M. & López, P. (February 11, 2011). The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information. Science Magazine, 332(6025), 60-65.

Contemporary data-centered research and scholarship can be categorized based on the types of data associated with the research activity:

e-Science: A natural evolution of computational science that involves massive simulations of phenomena of scientific interest too large or small, too fast or slow, or too complex to explore in a research laboratory. e-Science is computationally-intensive and frequently involves the use of distributed network environments and grid computing.

Data-Driven Science: A rapidly growing set of applications in which analysis of large amounts of experimental data drives the overall research. The sources of data are often high-throughput digital instruments and recording devices; for example, sophisticated astronomical instruments, particle accelerators, environmental sensors, medical diagnostic equipment, and many others. The petabytes of data that may result frequently require significant computation to yield the basic data for analysis. Data-driven science is a more recent paradigm primarily dependent upon new forms of data analytics.

Data-Intensive Research and Scholarship: This includes efforts based in part on the exploration, manipulation, and analysis of diverse datasets including born-digital data, data resulting from the continuing digitization of large analog collections, digital representations of physical artifacts and complex higher-order derived data constructs. Collaboration within and across disciplines may take a key role. Interoperable and highly contextualized datasets are often essential to success.

Data-intensive research is being broadly pursued in many disciplinary domains. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences are finding new problems of compelling interest that both have a strong technology component and are based on analysis of large and heterogeneous datasets. Collaborative efforts that involve technologists and domain researchers are leading to advances in knowledge and new understanding in many areas.

In all of the categories of research described above, data visualization of research findings is common and frequently the most effective way to present results.

Early programs at NSF were instrumental in leading the way to some of the data-intensive research that we are seeing today. The Supercomputer Centers Program, which was begun in the mid-1980s, and the NSFNet program that was originally part of the Supercomputer Centers Program in the 1980s, were very important. The NSFNet was originally envisioned to be a service-type of facility for the supercomputer centers. The idea was that if one built a network connecting large computing facilities around the United States, one could share datasets and aggregate computational cycles. The notion of a network as a means for federated search of data repositories had not yet been seriously discussed.

As the network evolved, it began to connect data stores. New access methods were developed and the idea of digital libraries emerged. I was given the responsibility to be the Program Director for the multiagency and international Digital Libraries Initiatives (DLI) that began in 1994 and continued as a programmatic entity well into the 2000s. This program is well documented. The broader impact of the program included not only noteworthy achievements in advancing academic research and scholarship, but also created profitable commercial entities as well; Google, Inc. being a prime example. The legacy of the DLI Program continues as new interdisciplinary communities develop and use digital content and advanced information infrastructure and tools to probe new problem domains. The culmination of support for large-scale computing and networking infrastructure was the NSF Cyberinfrastructure program, based on the findings outlined in a report written by a group led by Dan Atkins of the University of Michigan.

I want to focus on some of the disadvantages of researchers in developing countries. While some of the maps we have seen show increased connectivity in developing countries, bandwidth is not sufficient or uniform enough to support the data-intensive scholarship that I have been describing. For a researcher in a less developed or developing country, one of the primary considerations is a sense of isolation. Not only a sense of not being able to gain access to critical resources, but also of being left out of the mainstream of the scientific discourse that characterizes their particular disciplines and their particular research areas.

What is likely to happen? I think that the roles will be enhanced for certain libraries. Certainly the national libraries and the university and research libraries will be expected to carry the load. This is because they are likely to be the best equipped to handle data. They have been doing some of it for many years and know what makes it work. It is also because the scientists in general have very little interest in handling their own data. They want to use them, get their experiment done, and publish their results, but that is it, in most cases. We now are becoming aware that the reuse of data is of critical importance in terms of saving resources.

Finally, there are special topic libraries. These may be libraries of a single individual, but they have an

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⁹ See www.doaj.org

extraordinary wealth of information. Often the special libraries focus on a particular media like photographic libraries, image libraries, film libraries, or audio libraries, and these will become increasingly important as research resources for numerous scholarly domains.

While there is no single designation that is generally accepted to determine whether a country is developing or not, there are some general comments that one can make. Making data useful and facilitating scholarly communication and data curation services are among the most important and the most tractable activities for libraries in developing countries at present. What is more difficult is to assist directly in the establishment of close peer relationships with counterparts in other countries, provide high-bandwidth access to remote and distributed information stores, build advanced content management schemes, create sophisticated applications tools, and provide the level of support and services that libraries in more developing countries are able to provide.

There are some things that these institutions could begin immediately to do that might in fact bring them into the mainstream without the physical infrastructure enjoyed by their counterparts in more economically developed countries:

The emergence of a culture of sharing has accompanied the growth of the Internet and new communities involved in the creation and management of digital content and resources. The digital libraries community has been particularly instrumental. At the same time, there has been a general movement toward openness of internet based content and resources (when appropriate and legal). For example:

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is one example. The DOAJ lists more than 8000 journals (as of October 2012), from more than 110 countries in more than 50 languages. Over 4000 journals are providing metadata on the article level, which means that almost 900,000 articles are searchable from DOAJ.⁹ There are other global efforts that are the subject of this symposium.

Geography is a primary consideration in building high-bandwidth networks. In the case of Africa, many factors influence the cost and effort. The size of Africa alone presents formidable challenges. GÉANT¹⁰, the pan-European data network, has done a great deal of work in connecting various regions of the world. Internet2 has large international partnerships, and beyond their partnerships, they have other networks that are reachable. National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are an important core element of a country’s networking capabilities, as they are most often funded as part of a nation's budget and provide a single, robust connection point to NRENs in the rest of the world. NSF has an international network connections program.

Libraries will continue to play an essential role in the internetwork society. Libraries have managed the collected knowledge of the human record for centuries and will continue to do so. The manner in which this is done for digital content implies substantial and rapid change in established practices. This is being done already and new communities of practice are emerging that will continue to develop the means for confronting the ever-expanding volumes of data being created.

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¹⁰ See http://www.geant.net/pages/home.aspx

32. Developing a Policy Framework to Open up the Rights to Access and Reuse Research Data for the Next Generation of Researchers

Haswira Nor Mohamad Hashim Law and Justice Research Centre Queensland University of Technology, Australia

The Next Generation of Researchers

In order to identify who is the next generation of researchers, we need to distinguish them from the current generation of researchers. For the purpose of this paper, the current generation of researchers is identified not by their age or seniority, but by the research methodology that they adopt in their research projects and the medium of dissemination of their research data and information. Seen from this perspective, the current generation of researchers is a generation that is already taking advantage of information and communication technology by employing e-Science and e-Research methodologies and relying more on research collaborations that require intensive data sharing at both national and international levels. The current generation of researchers disseminates research data through both print and electronic media. Besides print publications and conference proceedings, research data were also published in open-access journals or self-archived in open-access data and repositories.

As for the next generation of researchers, it could be anticipated that they will continue to take advantage of the advancement of information and communication technology and be involved in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research collaborations, albeit at greater scale. Like the current generation of researchers, it is predicted that the next generation of researchers will continue to publish and self-archive their research data in open-access journals and open-access repositories as alternatives to conventional methods of dissemination. At first glance, it seems that the next generation of researchers will share many similarities with the current generation of researchers whose roles they will take over in the future.

Despite these similarities, it can be observed that the current generation of researchers has become the victim of a serial crisis arising from a toll-access system widely practiced by journal publishers.¹¹ Apart from that, the rapid expansion of copyright protection and the introduction of sui generis database rights in the European Union and a few other countries, which took place during the era of the current generation of researchers, has resulted in almost all categories of research data becoming the property of either the researchers or the research institutions that employ the researchers, or the research agencies that fund the research.¹² Research data, which contains a wealth of information is no longer freely accessible.¹³

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¹¹ See Open Access to Research Outputs: Final Report to RCUK, 2008, 21, available at <http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/cmsweb/downloads/rcuk/news/oareport.pdf> (accessed March 11, 2010); Science and Technology Committee, 2004, Science and Technology – Tenth Report, U.K. House of Commons, Science and Technology Committee.

¹² The United States has not adopted sui generis protection for databases, in contrast to Europe.

¹³ See The Royal Society (U.K.), 2003, Keeping Science Open: The Effects of Intellectual Property Policy on the Conduct of Science, 21, available at <http://royalsociety.org/Report_WF.aspx?pageid=9842&terms=Keeping+science+openpercent3A+the+effects+of+intellectual+property+policy+on+the+conduct+of+science> (accessed February 26, 2010) v.; Paul A. David, 2004, Can “open science” be protected from the evolving regime of IPR protections? 129(March) Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 3; Pamela Samuelson, 2003, Mapping the digital public domain: Threats and opportunities, 66(1 & 2) Law and Contemporary Problems 170; James Boyle, 2003, Foreword: The opposite of property? 66(1 & 2) Law and Contemporary Problems 13; Jerome H. Reichman and Tracy Lewis, 2005, Using liability rules to stimulate local innovation in developing countries: Application to traditional knowledge, in Keith Eugene Maskus and Jerome H. Reichman, eds., International Public Goods and Transfer of Technology Under a Globalized Intellectual Property Regime (Cambridge University Press) 340; P. A. Andanda, 2006, Human-tissue-related inventions: Ownership and intellectual property rights in international collaborative research in developing countries, 34 J Med Ethics 172; Samuel E. Trosow, 2003, Copyright Protection for Federally Funded Research: Necessary Incentive or Double Subsidy? 18, available at <http://publish.uwo.ca/-strosow/Sabo_Bill_Paper.pdf> (accessed September 12, 2010); Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, 2003, Ideas, artifacts, and facilities: Information as a common-pool resource, 66 Law

The current generation of researchers’ access to and reuse of research data are subject to consent or license from the owners or custodians of research data. Further, the emphasis on commercialization of publicly funded research outputs had seen data access and sharing practices replaced by the norms of secrecy, whereby data withholding (including by academic researchers) is widely practiced, resulting in the tragedy of anticommons.¹⁴

While the current generation of researchers and the next generation of researchers may share many similarities, the current generation of researchers is seen as a generation deprived of their rights to access and reuse research data and scholarly information. It is therefore deemed important to ensure that the next generation of researchers will not suffer the same disadvantages as their predecessors.

The Need to Open up the Rights to Access and Reuse Research Data for the Next Generation of Researchers

It is predicted that the roles that the next generation of researchers are going to play will be far more challenging in understanding global phenomena, solving problems, and improving the human condition, which are the aims of basic and applied research. Global crises such as climate change, rapid population growth, scarcity in natural resources, and natural disasters will be inherited by the next generation of researchers from their predecessors with a greater sense of urgency, as the problems are expected to be more acute. In solving these problems, the next generation of researchers will depend on the latest scientific data in their field, especially in the fields of research where a global picture is necessary for the development of effective international programs to solve transboundary problems such as infectious disease control and monitoring, environmental conservation, and climate change.¹⁵ Without the ability to access and reuse research data, their research projects become meaningless, if not impossible.¹⁶

It could also be anticipated that the scientific research that will be undertaken by the next generation of researchers is becoming data driven and data intensive at a scale previously unimagined.¹⁷ It is predicted that data-intensive science will emerge as a new paradigm of scientific research. This data-intensive science was described by Jim Gray as the “Fourth Paradigm,”¹⁸ which is a new addition to the previous three scientific paradigms: theory, experimentation, and computational science.¹⁹ The emergence of data-intensive research undertaken by scientists on a global scale requires opening early-stage research data in order to encourage broader participation and accelerate discoveries.²⁰ In playing their roles as researchers

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and Contemporary Problems 112; Carol M. Rose, 2003, Romans, roads, and romantic creators: Traditions of public property in the information age 66 Law and Contemporary Problems 90.

¹⁴ See Bhaven N. Sampat, 2006, Patenting and US academic research in the 20th century: The world before and after Bayh-Dole, 35 Research Policy 784; Dirk Czarnitzki, Wolfgang Glanzel, and Katrin Hussinger, 2009, Heterogeneity of patenting activity and its implications for scientific research, 38 Research Policy 33; Jerry G. Thursby, Richard Jensen, and Marie G. Thursby, 2001, Objectives, characteristics and outcomes of university licensing: A survey of major U.S. universities, 26 Journal of Technology Transfer 59; Peter D. Blumberg, 1996, From “publish or perish” to “profit or perish” : Revenues from university technology transfer and the s. 501(c)(3) tax exemption, 145(1) The University of Pennsylvania Law Review 91; Andrew F. Christie et al., 2003, Analysis of the Legal Framework for Patent Ownership in Publicly Funded Research Institutions (Commonwealth of Australia Department of Education, Science and Training) 48.

¹⁵ Barbara Kirsop and Leslie Chan, 2005, Transforming access to research literature for developing countries, 31(4) Serials Review 24.

¹⁶ Marjut Salokannel, 2003, Global Public Goods and Private Rights: Scientific Research and Intellectual Property Rights, 11, available at <http://www.iprinfo.com/tiedostot/5icFWowu.pdf> (accessed October 12, 2010).

¹⁷ Michael L. Nelson, 2009, Data-driven science: A new paradigm? 44(4) Educause 6.

¹⁸ See Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Tolle, eds., 2009, The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery (Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington).

¹⁹ Michael L. Nelson, Data-driven science, 6; Francine Berman and Henry E. Brady, 2005, Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure for the Social and Behavioral Sciences: Final Report (National Science Foundation) 32.

²⁰ Anne Fitzgerald and Kylie Pappalardo, 2007, Building the infrastructure for data access and reuse in collaborative research: An analysis of the legal context, in Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project: Legal Protocols for Copyright Management: Facilitating Open Access to Research at the National and International Levels, 58, available at <http://www.oaklaw.qut.edu.au/files/Data_Report_final_web.pdf> (accessed January 11, 2010).

amidst data-driven and data-intensive science, access to and reuse of research data will be essential for the next generation of researchers.

Besides the emergence of data-intensive science to solve global problems, another reason the next generation of researchers needs to be given the rights to access and reuse research data is to facilitate their participation in international, interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary research collaborations. As global society turns to science with more and more problems, it will require the collaboration of the next generation of researchers from various disciplines to think about solutions to the same problem.²¹ In this regard, science can no longer be managed within the old silo research model, as it requires thousands of collaborators across distinct institutional boundaries.²² Collaboration among researchers is said to be an interactive process, where two or more researchers, or research organizations, work together toward common objectives by sharing knowledge and research results using collaborative research networking tools.²³ The collaborative research requires the ability to search, access, move, manipulate, and mine research data like never before.²⁴

As discussed above, global research collaboration requires the next generation of researchers all around the world to contribute and share their research data and information online. The National Science Foundation report Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure stated that wider and easier access to reports, raw data, and instruments are needed in order to change science and engineering research.²⁵ Fry et al. argued that e-Science and e-Research collaborations are not only about access to secondary resources such as scientific articles, or to primary resources such as databanks, but also to openness in tool development and the sharing of software code to extend and modify tools.²⁶ As most research data are protected under a copyright or database-right legal regime, opening up the rights to access and reuse research data will form a big part of the emerging infrastructure for globally organized collaborative research activities.

The need to open up the rights to access and reuse research data also arises from conventional research libraries and the traditional publishing system not being well suited to the need of the next generation of researchers, who will require not only access to the latest research data but also the ability to communicate their research results as quickly as possible. While access to and reuse of research data are highly in demand, research libraries and journal publishers have not been typically responsible to archive research data, so the role of the library and publishers as data steward is largely absent.²⁷ In contrast, opening up access to and reuse of research data facilitates the collaboration of various research efforts, which in a closed-access world are circumscribed by conventional definitions of topic, field, or discipline and are isolated from one another in discrete families of journals.²⁸ With proper infrastructure such as open-access repositories, researchers in different domains can collaborate on the same dataset, and use, reuse, and combine data, which increases productivity and reveals new insights.²⁹ Based on the above

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²¹ Francine Berman and Henry E. Brady, 2005, Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure for the Social and Behavioral Sciences: Final Report (National Science Foundation) 57; Committee on National Statistics,1985, Issues and recommendations, in Stephen E. Fienberg, Margaret E. Martin, and Miron L. Straf, eds., Sharing Research Data (National Academy Press, Washington, DC) 24, 25.

²² Yochai Benkler, 2008, The university in the networked economy and society (November/December) Educause 65.

²³ David Bicknell, 2009, Collaboration drives innovation (Apr 28–May 4) Computer Weekly 14.

²⁴ Tony Hey and Anne E. Trefethen, 2005, Cyberinfrastructure for e-Science, 308 Science Mag 818.

²⁵ Daniel E. Atkins et al., 2003, Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure (National Science Foundation) 17, 28.

²⁶ Jenny Fry, Ralph Schroeder, and Matthijs des Besten, 2009, Open science in e-Science: Contingency or policy? 65(1) Journal of Documentation 7.

²⁷ Neil Rambo, 2009, E-science and biomedical libraries, 97(3) J Med Libr Assoc 160.

²⁸ Alma Swan, 2007, Open access and the progress of science, 95(May-June) American Scientist 200.

²⁹ Kostas Glinos, 2010, Report of the High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data: “Riding the Wave: How Europe Can Gain From the Rising Tide of Scientific Data – A Vision for 2030” (European Commission.

arguments, the need to open up the rights to access and reuse research data for the next generation of researchers is therefore justified.

The Next Generation of Researchers’ Responsibilities as Providers and Users of Research Data

As discussed in the previous section, current developments point toward the need to open up the rights to access and reuse research data. Given the rapid progress of the open-access movement for research data,³⁰ it could be expected that the next generation of researchers will be vested with greater rights to access and reuse research data compared to their predecessors. Quite naturally, their rights to access and reuse research data, comes with responsibilities as providers and users of research data. This section examines the responsibilities that must be observed by the next generation of researchers in playing their dual roles as providers and users of research data.

The Responsibilities of the Next Generation of Researchers as Data Providers

In permitting access to and reuse of research data, the data providers have the responsibility not to disclose research data that contains confidential information and not to share it with a third party.³¹ From a legal perspective, nondisclosure of confidential research data implies a legal duty that further disclosure of research data to a third party will not be allowed to occur without permission or authorization from an individual or entity that discloses confidential information in the first place.³² A nondisclosure duty could arise from contractual agreements such as a trade secret agreement, confidential agreement, or nondisclosure agreement.³³ Besides a nondisclosure duty arising from contractual agreements, it is common for the researchers, during the data collection process, to offer their promise of confidentiality that they will treat any data or information disclosed to them as confidential information. The promise of confidentiality could be given verbally or written on the consent form, interview script, survey form, recruitment letter, or brochure.³⁴

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³⁰ See UNESCO, 2007, Kronberg Declaration on the Future of Knowledge Acquisition and Sharing, available at <http://www.unesco.de/kronberg_declaration.html?&L=0> (accessed February 26, 2007); Organization for Economic CoOperation and Development, 2004, Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding, available at <http://www.oecd.org/document/0,2340,en_2649_34487_25998799_1_1_1_1,00.html> (accessed February 25, 2010); Council of the European Union, 2007, Council Conclusions on Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation, 1, available at <http://www.consilium.europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressData/en/intm/97236.pdf> (accessed February 28, 2010); Treaty on Access to Knowledge, 2005, available at <http://www.cptech.org/a2k/a2k_treaty_may9.pdf> (accessed March 10, 2010); International Seminar Open Access for Developing Countries, 2005, Salvador declaration on open access: The developing world perspective, available at <http://www.icml9.org/meetings/openaccess/public/documents/declaration.htm> (accessed February 26, 2010); Australian Research Information Infrastructure Committee, 2004, Open Access Statement, available at <www.caul.edu.au/caul-doc/caul20051ariic.doc> (accessed February 28, 2010); Iryna Kuchma, 2006, Berlin 4 : International Conference On Open Access, 24, available at <http://berlin4.aei.mpg.de/presentations/Kuchma_OA06.pdf> (accessed March 1, 2010); Ingegerd Rabow, 2008, Open access in Sweden: Recent development, 1 Sciecom Info, available at <http://www.sciecom.org/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/viewFile/245/94> (accessed March 1, 2010); Hawk Jia, 2006, China Unveils Plans to Boost Scientific Data Sharing, available at <http://www.scidev.net/en/news/china-unveils-plans-to-boost-scientific-data-shari.html> (accessed March 1, 2010); Peter Suber, 2007, Pakistani Journals to be Available for Worldwide Electronic Access through Online Portal, available at <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/05/pakistan-plans-oa-portal-for-all-its.html> (accessed March 1, 2010); Stevan Harnad, 2007, Brazilian Bill to Mandate OA, available at <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/06/brazilian-bill-to-mandate-oa.html> (accessed March 1, 2010); see Peter Suber, 2007, Spain is Funding OA Repositories, available at <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/05/spain-is-funding-oa-repositories.html> (accessed March 1, 2010).

³¹ Terry Elizabeth Hendrick, 1985, Justifications for and obstacles to data sharing, in Stephen E. Fienberg, Margaret E. Martin, and Miron L. Straf, eds., Sharing Research Data (National Academy Press, Washington, DC) 135; Michele M. Easter, Arlene M. Davis, and Gail E. Henderson, 2004, Confidentiality: More than a linkage file and a locked drawer, 26(2) IRB: Ethics and Human Research 14.

³² Howard Bauchner, 2002, Protecting research participants, 110 Pediatrics 402. See also Jean E. Wylie and Geraldine P. Mineau, 2003, Biomedical databases: Protecting privacy and promoting research, 21(3) TRENDS in Biotechnology 113.

³³ See Ian Story, 2004, Intellectual Property and Computer Software: A Battle of Competing Use and Access Visions for Countries of the South, 12; Software, available at <htt://www.answers.com/topic/computer-software> (accessed May 27, 2010).

³⁴ Easter, Davis, and Henderson, Confidentiality, 13.

The next generation of researchers who act as data providers also have the responsibility to protect personal or sensitive data of human subjects, usually referred to as informational privacy. The informational privacy concerns the limits on access to personal information, whereby anonymity and secrecy are branches of it.³⁵ Although tremendous value can be unlocked through the use of data, the fact remains that the public is concerned about the use of highly personal information.³⁶ For various reasons, the data subjects may not want their personal data to be revealed to a third party. This may be to avoid discrimination, personal embarrassment, or damage to their personal or professional reputation.³⁷ Hence, the data providers must make an important distinction between research data collected on human subjects and research data on other impersonal subjects. While research data that describes natural phenomena has a low degree of sensitivity, research data that describes humans, their activities, opinions, or behaviors may pose a high degree of sensitivity.³⁸

The next generation of researchers as data providers also has the responsibility to ensure that the research data they provide to others will not prejudice national interest and security.³⁹ In the McKinsey report on big data, it was stated that data access can expose not only personal information and confidential corporate information but even national security and secrets.⁴⁰ Schaffer argued that advocates of open access are not proposing that institutions allow unfettered access to sensitive data that could place the security of a nation or the world at risk.⁴¹ Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) guarantee individuals the right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media of their choice, these rights are not without limitation.⁴² In recognizing the right to impart information, the ICCPR states that the exercise of these rights carries with it special duties and responsibilities, and they are subject to certain restrictions, including for the protection of national security or of public order, as shall be provided by law.⁴³ Therefore, where there is a conflict between access to and reuse of research data with national security considerations, the national interest and security shall prevail.⁴⁴

Finally, there is a responsibility for the next generation of researchers as data providers to ensure the quality and accuracy of research data that becomes the subject matter of access and reuse. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development principle on data quality states that data should be relevant to the purposes for which they are to be used and, to the extent necessary for those purposes, should be accurate, complete, and kept up to date.⁴⁵ While data accuracy denotes the closeness of results of observations to the true values or values accepted as being true,⁴⁶ data quality refers to the accuracy and completeness of the data and “fitness for use” for a specific dataset. It could be anticipated that a particular dataset will be unfit for use if the data and information is uncertain, inaccurate, or

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³⁵ Jeantine E. Lunshof et al., 2008, From genetic privacy to open consent, 9 Nature Reviews Genetics 407.

³⁶ James Manyika et al., 2011, Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity (McKinsey Global Institute) 119.

³⁷ See Privacy, Wikipedia, available at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy> (accessed June 29, 2010).

³⁸ Christine L. Borgman, 2005, Disciplinary differences in e-Research: an information perspective (paper presented at the International Conference on e-Social Science 2005, Manchester, UK).

³⁹ Stephen Hilgartner and Sherry I. Brandt-Rauf, 1994, Data access, ownership, and control: Toward empirical studies of access practices, 15 Science Communication 356.

⁴⁰ James Manyika et al., 2011, Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity (McKinsey Global Institute) 11.

⁴¹ Daniel Schaffer, 2011, Free Data Has Great Value, But Challenges Remain, available at <http://www.scidev.net/en/features/free-data-has-great-value-but-challenges-remain-.html> (accessed June 28, 2011).

⁴² See Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, Art. 19; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Art. 19.

⁴³ See International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Art. 19.3

⁴⁴ Hilgartner and Brandt-Rauf, Data access, ownership, and control, 356.

⁴⁵ OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data – Data Quality Principle.

⁴⁶ David J. Buckey, [year?] Data Accuracy and Quality, available at <http://planet.botany.uwc.ac.za/nisl/GIS/GIS_primer/page_08.htm> (accessed February 15, 2011).

erroneous.⁴⁷ Data providers have important roles to play to ensure the quality of research data.⁴⁸ The researcher who is both data creator and data provider is ultimately responsible for ensuring the quality of research data that are shared with others.⁴⁹ Being data providers, the next generation of researchers need to remind themselves that the users of research data may not know that the research data are incomplete, incompatible, or poorly documented.⁵⁰ Therefore, they need to be responsible for the quality and accuracy of research data provided by them.

The Responsibilities of the Next Generation of Researchers as Data Users

It is important for the next generation of researchers to understand that opening up the rights to access research data should not be construed as data owners having relinquished all their exclusive rights over research data. From the perspective of copyright law, opening up the rights to access and reuse research data will not in any way extinguish copyright in research data.⁵¹ Opening up the rights to access research data does not amount to the data owner surrendering their intellectual property rights in research data. The data owners can still retain exclusive control over derivative use and commercial exploitation of research data.⁵² Hence, open access to research data does not include free riding or opportunistic use, such as profit making or commercial exploitation of research data, unless specifically allowed by data owners. Since data owners still retain their rights to control use and reuse of research data, the next generation of researchers has the responsibility to ensure that they do not reuse the research data beyond the permitted rights given by data owners.⁵³ In the absence of explicit permission from data owners, the data users should access and reuse the research data within the scope of legitimate use provided under the fair use or fair dealing exceptions under copyright law, which permit certain uses without the need to obtain permission from data owners.

If data users need to access and reuse research data outside the scope of legitimate use provided under the fair use or fair dealing exceptions, permission must be obtained by data users from data owners.⁵⁴ In this regard, permission to access and reuse research data are subject to different licensing arrangements that require separate negotiations between data owners and data users. ⁵⁵ These separate negotiations will result in different licensing rights between one licensing contract to another, which depends mostly on the

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⁴⁷ See Jeffrey W. Seifert, 2007, CRS Report for Congress: Data Mining and Homeland Security: An Overview (Congressional Research Service) CRS-22; Earl F. Eipstein, Gary J. Hunter, and Aggrey Agumya, 1998, Liability insurance and the use of geographical information, 12(3) Int. J. Geographical Information Science 203; see also Aggrey Agumya and Gary J. Hunter, 1999, A risk-based approach to assessing the “fitness for use” of spatial data, 11(1) URISA Journal 33.

⁴⁸ Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in [the ???]Digital Age, 2009, Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, Washington, DC), 4.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 40.

⁵⁰ Jennifer L. Philips, 1999, Information liability: The possible chilling effect of tort claims against producers of geographic information systems data, 26 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 749.

⁵¹ David Shulenburger, 2003, Scholarly communications is not toxic waste: Lessons learned (prepared for the Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities Conference, Max Planck Society, Harnack Haus, Berlin, October) 4, available at <http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/bitstream/1808/58/1/Scholarlypercent20Communicationspercent20ispercent20Notpercent20Toxicpercent203.pdf> (accessed October 9, 2010).

⁵² See Michele Boldrin and David Levine, 2002, The case against intellectual property, 92(2) The American Economic Review 209; Estelle A. Fishbein, 1991, Ownership of research data, 66(3) Academic Medicine 129.

⁵³ Anne Fitzgerald, Neale Hooper, and Brian Fitzgerald, 2010, Enabling open access to public sector information with Creative Commons licenses – The Australian experience, in Access to Public Sector Information : Law, Technology & Policy (Sydney University Press); Linda Wang, 1999, Use of images for commercial purposes: Copyright issues under Malaysian laws, in Barbara Hoffman, ed., Exploiting Images and Image Collections in the New Media: Gold Mine or Legal Minefield? (Kluwer Law International, London, UK) 86.

⁵⁴ Stephanie Woods, 2008, Creative commons – A useful development in the New Zealand copyright sphere? 14 Canterbury Law Review 38.

⁵⁵ Wang, Use of images for commercial purposes, 86.

attitude and bargaining strength of the negotiating parties.⁵⁶ Because there could be several layers of intellectual property protection in research data, negotiations to obtain the rights to access and reuse research data could also be very cumbersome, time consuming, and excessively difficult.⁵⁷

The next generation of researchers as data users also has the responsibility not to infringe on the moral rights of data creators. The moral rights under copyright law are meant to protect the rights of the author who creates the work.⁵⁸ Two most widely recognized moral rights are (1) the right of attribution, ensuring the data creators are recognized as the originators of their own work; and (2) the right of integrity, which allows data creators to object to mistreatment, misuse, or abuse of their works.⁵⁹ In the presence of moral right of integrity, data users are required to obtain permission from data creators or their personal representatives before they can significantly alter, modify, or distort the research data. In the absence of such permission, data users could be prohibited by data creators from making any alterations, modifications, or distortions to the research data, regardless of whether the alterations, modifications, or distortions would negatively affect or objectively improve their works.⁶⁰

Balancing the Next Generation of Researchers’ Rights to Access and Reuse Research Data with Their Responsibilities as Providers and Users of Research Data

The proponents of open access have long identified the need for a clear policy if the rights to access and reuse of research data are to be successfully implemented.⁶¹ It was argued that, from a legal perspective, it is not possible to establish any kind of open-access system simply by default. Rather, development of an open-access system can only successfully occur through deliberate construction and active management, supported by policies and laws that facilitate the rights to access and reuse research data. ⁶² In a report by the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences have recommendations that public and institutional policies be developed to foster openness and access not only in science and engineering research but also in humanities and social sciences research.⁶³

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⁵⁶ Academic Senate of the California State University, 2003, Intellectual Property, Fair Use, and the Unbundling of Ownership Rights (California State University) 18.

⁵⁷ Wang, Use of images for commercial purposes, 46.

⁵⁸ Cyrill P. Rigamonti, 2006, Deconstructing moral rights, 47(2) Harvard International Law Journal 360.

⁵⁹ See Mira T. Sundara Rajan, 2002, Moral rights and copyright harmonization: Prospects for an international moral right? (paper presented at 17th BILETA Annual Conference), available at http://www.bileta.ac.uk/02papers/sundarajan.html; Chris Armbruster, 2008, Cyberscience and the knowledge-based economy: Open access and trade publishing: From contradiction to compatibility with nonexclusive copyright licensing, (12) International Journal of Communications Law and Policy 17; Chris Armstrong et al., 2010, ACA2K: Comparative Review of Research Findings (Shuttleworth Foundation and University of Witwatersrand).

⁶⁰ Cyrill P. Rigamonti, Deconstructing moral rights, 49, 364.

⁶¹ See Paul Uhlir and Peter Schroder, 2008, Open data for global science, in Brian Fitzgerald, ed., Legal Framework for e-Research (Sydney University Press, Sydney) 216–217; V. M. Moskovkin, 2008, Institutional policies for open access to the results of scientific research, 35(6) Scientific and Technical Information Processing 269; Brian Fitzgerald, Anne Fitzgerald, Professor Mark Perry, Scott Kiel-Chisholm, Erin Driscoll, Dilan Thampapillai, Jessica Coates, 2008, Creating a legal framework for copyright management of open access within the Australian academic and research sector, in Brian Fitzgerald, ed., Legal Framework for e-Research (Sydney University Press, Sydney) 283; Peter Arzberger et al., 2004, An international framework to promote access to data, 303 Science 1777; Anne Fitzgerald, Brian Fitzgerald, and Kylie Pappalardo, 2009, The future of data policy, in Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Tolle, eds., The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery (Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington) 201; John Unsworth et al., 2006, Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 29, 30. ⁶² See Brian Fitzgerald, Anne Fitzgerald, Professor Mark Perry, Scott Kiel-Chisholm, Erin Driscoll, Dilan Thampapillai, Jessica Coates, 2008, Creating a legal framework for copyright management of open access within the Australian academic and research sector, in Brian Fitzgerald, ed., Legal Framework for e-Research (Sydney University Press, Sydney) 283; Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald, and Pappalardo, Creating a legal framework, 53, 201; Anne Fitzgerald, Kylie Papalardo, and Anthony Austin, 2008, Legal implications surrounding data access, sharing and reuse, in Brian Fitzgerald, ed., Legal Framework for e-Research (Sydney University Press, Sydney) 161.

⁶³ Unsworth et al., Our Cultural Commonwealth, 29, 30.

In the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) Berlin Conference discussion paper on international guidelines for access to research data, it was further proposed that where copyright or database law applies, the parties responsible for agreements and contracts concerning access to research data should take the relevant implications of the existing legal framework into account to allow for open access.⁶⁴ Due to the above recommendations, the next question that needs to be answered in this paper is, how should the data access and reuse policy framework that is to be developed balance the next generation of researchers’ rights to access and reuse research data with their responsibilities as data providers and data users?

Balancing the Rights and Responsibilities as Open-Access Data Providers: The Responsibility Not to Disclose Research Data that Contains Confidential Information

A data access and reuse policy should balance the next generation of researchers’ rights to access and reuse research data with their responsibilities as data providers by putting in place a proper mechanism to ensure the confidential data are protected while allowing access to and reuse of research data. The U.S. Panel on Data Access for Research Purposes has suggested that the confidentiality of research data be addressed by using a variety of modes for data access. The panel’s suggestion involves restricting access to confidential data as well as granting unrestricted access to appropriately altered public-use data.⁶⁵ The U.S. National Research Council’s Committee on National Statistics has also proposed for the technical and statistical solutions to be adopted to enable access to and reuse of data without violating a nondisclosure obligation. The statistical solutions involved data alteration, while the technical solutions involve restricted access to research data.⁶⁶ Data access and reuse policy may also require the adoption of special licensing agreements for access to confidential data in order to balance the need for data access with confidentiality protection.⁶⁷

The Responsibility to Protect the Informational Privacy of Data Subjects

Data access and reuse policy should find a way to balance the rights to access and reuse research data with the protection of informational privacy.⁶⁸ As part of the balance between data access and data protection of informational privacy, the U.S. Privacy Protection Study Commission proposed that personal information not be disclosed to a third party in an individually identifiable form.⁶⁹ It was suggested in the report that in most cases, omitting identifiers, such as name, address, telephone number, and subject identification number, is enough to protect the anonymity of research participants.⁷⁰ Similarly the U.S. National Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in a Digital Age also submitted in its report that for some research data, privacy protection can be addressed by removing identifiers before the sharing or public release of data.⁷¹ Hence, a data-access and reuse policy should require data providers to remove data identifiers before sharing or public release of research data.

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⁶⁴ Peter Schroder, 2004, Towards International Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding (Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development) 22.

⁶⁵ Panel on Data Access for Research Purposes, 2005, Expanding Access to Research Data: Reconciling Risks and Opportunities (National Research Council) 3.

⁶⁶ National Research Council Committee on National Statistics, 2000, Improving Access to and Confidentiality of Research Data: Report of a Workshop, 29, 32.

⁶⁷ Panel on Data Access for Research Purposes, Expanding Access to Research Data, 56, 4.

⁶⁸ R. J. Bazillion, 1984, The effect of access and privacy legislation on the conduct of scholarly research in Canada, 4 Social Science Information Studies 7.

⁶⁹ Privacy Protection Study Commission (USA), 1997, Personal Privacy in an Information Society: The Report of the Privacy Protection Study Commission.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in a Digital Age, 2009, Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine) 68.

Researchers who archived their research data should be requested to erase or change all names in transcripts and other material and erase any personal information that points directly to an individual.⁷²

The policy should also require research data that contains sensitive and personal information to be coded, and procedures be put in place to control access.⁷³ Besides de-identification and coding techniques, a range of other techniques to protect informational privacy could be employed in relation to different types of research data, either qualitative or statistical. The techniques are based on reducing data specificity, distorting data, decreasing sampling sizes, and perturbing, rounding, swapping, and adding noise to the research data before release.⁷⁴ All the above technical measures could be used to protect the informational privacy while opening up the rights to access and reuse research data that contains personal information.

The Responsibility to Safeguard National Interests and Security

Data access and reuse policy should safeguard classified and secret data, where their disclosure could jeopardize national interests and security. Where national security and secrecy laws are in place to protect national interests and security, data access and reuse policy should ensure this legal duty is complied with by data providers. Therefore, there is a need to create a specific exemption in the policy, whereby the next generation of researchers is prohibited from sharing research data that is subject to national security or secrecy legislation. To balance the rights to access and reuse research data with the responsibility to safeguard national interests and security, the policy that is to be developed needs to clarify and draw a line between classified and unclassified data.⁷⁵ According to the U.S. National Academies’ Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in the Digital Age, research data pertaining to intelligence and military or terrorist activities should not be shared by researchers for security reasons.⁷⁶ Research related to nuclear, radiological, and biological threats; chemicals and explosives; human and agricultural health systems; and information technology infrastructure may also contain data that is the subject of national interests and security.⁷⁷

The Responsibility to Ensure Data Quality and Accuracy

To ensure data quality and accuracy, data access and reuse policy should require data providers to actively supply and complete information about the research data provided.⁷⁸ If nonreviewed or nonverified research data are allowed to be shared for access and reuse, the data access and reuse policy should require data providers to warn or to notify data users of the quality and accuracy of research data. In the United States, the Office of Management and Budget’s 2002 Guidelines for Ensuring and Maximizing the Quality, Objectivity, Utility, and Integrity of Information Disseminated by Federal Agencies (OMB Guidelines) require federal agencies, including the research institutions that are required by the government to disseminate publicly funded data, to adopt specific standards of quality that are appropriate for various categories of data that they disseminate. ⁷⁹ To this end, the standards and quality

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⁷² Anne Sofia Fink, 2000, The role of the researcher in the qualitative research process. A potential barrier to archiving qualitative data, 1(3) Forum: Qualitative Social Research, available at <http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/viewArticle/1021/2201> (accessed July 2, 2011).

⁷³ Beatrice Godard et al., 2003, Data storage and DNA banking for biomedical research: Informed consent, confidentiality, quality issues, ownership, return of benefits. A professional perspective, 11(Suppl 2) European Journal of Human Genetics S91.

⁷⁴ Mark Elliot, Kingsley Purdam, and Duncan Smith, 2005, Confidential data access using grid computing: An outline of the issues and possible solutions (paper presented at the International Conference on e-Social Science 2005, Manchester Conference Center, June 22–24).

⁷⁵ Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in a Digital Age, Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data, 62.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 68.

⁷⁷ Ibid.

⁷⁸ Earl F. Eipstein, Gary J. Hunter, and Aggrey Agumya, 1998, Liability insurance and the use of geographical information, 12(3) Int. J. Geographical Information Science 210.

⁷⁹ Guidelines for Ensuring and Maximizing the Quality, Objectivity, Utility and Integrity of Information Disseminated by Federal Agencies 2002, Guidelines III, para.1.

to ensure data quality provided under the OMB Guidelines could be used by data access and reuse policy for the purpose of imposing a standard of care on data providers to ensure data quality and accuracy.

Balancing the Rights and Responsibilities as Open-Access Data Users: The Responsibility Not to Use or Reuse Open-Access Research Data Beyond The Permitted Rights

In most countries, the fair use or fair dealing exceptions that dispense the need to obtain the data owner’s permission is limited to access and reuse of research data for private and educational purposes only. While the next generation of researchers require the right to access and reuse research data to be opened, the restrictive scope of legitimate use under fair use or fair dealing exceptions under copyright law could prevent data users from exploiting the full value and potential of research data.⁸⁰ For the purpose of opening up the rights to access and reuse research data, it was argued by Graham Greenleaf that the rights to access and reuse the research data given by data owners should be more extensive and beyond fair use or fair dealing exceptions offered by the copyright law.⁸¹ For Uhlir and Schroder, open access in the context of public research data should be interpreted as access on equal terms for the international research community, as well as industry, with the fewest restrictions on reuse.⁸² This could well mean that the next generation of researchers should be given broad rights to access and reuse research data, including for profit, industrial, commercial, or nonacademic research purposes.

The Responsibility to Obtain Permission to Access and Reuse Research Data

One of the critical aspects in opening up the rights to access and reuse research data are to ensure that the rights are not only given to the first user but that they remain freely accessible and usable by downstream users.⁸³ In granting the rights to access and reuse data, data owners can choose from a wide range of licensing conditions, from the widest possible license to the narrowest form of licensing.⁸⁴ If data users have to enter into licensing or assignment contracts with data owners each time they require access to and reuse of research data, the progress of research will be retarded and transaction cost for data access will be high.⁸⁵ Even when the rights to access and reuse is granted by data owners by way of licensing, the copyright licensing mechanism is said to be time-consuming, and not well suited to the digital environment.

To balance the need to access and reuse research data with the responsibilities to obtain licensing rights, a data access and reuse policy should require data owners to adopt the simplest form of licensing scheme that accelerates and produces the optimum rights to access and reuse research data. ⁸⁶ To this end, the policy should require data owners to give permission in advance to data users to access and reuse the research data. This advance permission should be given in a ready-made template by using standard licensing schemes such as Creative Commons licenses, Science Commons licenses, or GNU General Public License. In this regard, the better approach for promoting open access to data is to apply for a

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⁸⁰ Nicole Ebber, 2008, Creative Commons licenses: New ways of granting and utilizing access to information (paper presented at the 16th BOBCATSSS Symposium 2008 – Providing Access to Information for Everyone, Zadar, Croatia, January 28–30).

⁸¹ Graham Greenleaf, 2008, Unlocking IP to Stimulate Australian Innovation: An Issues Paper (University of New South Wales). See also P. Arzberger et al., 2004, Promoting access to public research data for scientific, economic, and social development, 3 Data Science Journal 146; Kai Ekholm, Access to Our Digital Heritage

⁸² Paul Uhlir and Peter Schroder, 2008, Open data for global science, in Brian Fitzgerald, ed., Legal Framework for e-Research: Realising the Potential (Sydney University Press Sydney) 209.

⁸³ Karl-Nikolaus Peifer, 2008, Open access and (German) copyright, in Open Access: Opportunities and Challenges – A Handbook (UNESCO) 50.

⁸⁴ Woods, Creative commons, 45.

⁸⁵ Gideon Emcee Christian, 2009, Building a Sustainable Framework for Open Access to Research Data Through Information and Communication Technologies (International Development Research Center (IDRC) Canada) 22.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 75.

Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license to the data. This allows the data to be widely shared and used, but also preserves the creator’s right to attribution.⁸⁷

The Responsibility Not to Infringe on Data Creators’ Moral Rights

To open up the rights to access and reuse research data for the next generation of researchers, the moral right of integrity should be construed in such a way as to ensure that the personal interests of authors do not interfere with the legitimate self-expression of future authors.⁸⁸ Data access and reuse policy should provide guidelines about what sort of acts are considered as infringing on data creators’ moral rights. To this end, there should be clear guidelines about the reasonable circumstances that allow alteration or modification of the research data without being construed as an infringement of data creators’ moral rights of integrity. There should also be exceptions to data creators’ moral rights of integrity for certain categories of copyright works as found in the Australian Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 (Commonwealth of Australia),⁸⁹ the U.K. Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) 1988,⁹⁰ and the U.S. Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. ⁹¹ Further, in the U.K. CDPA,⁹² the moral right to integrity does not exist for copyright work produced under work for hire, that is, arising from employment or commissioned work. Applying the U.K. approach, this paper argues that, where the research data are publicly funded or produced by data creators under work for hire, they should be required to waive their moral right to integrity, which enables the research data to be transformed into beneficial use by other researchers.

Conclusion

This presentation argues that to avoid the next generation of researchers suffering the same disadvantages as their predecessors, it is deemed necessary to open up the rights to access and reuse research data. Premised upon this argument, this paper further argues that a policy framework needs to be developed to balance the rights and responsibilities of the next generation of researchers as providers and users of research data. Therefore, apart from establishing the need to open up the rights to access and reuse research data for the next generation of researchers, this paper has also put forward several recommendations for balancing the rights to access and reuse research data with the responsibilities outlined above. Most of these recommendations would be best carried out by the research funders and the research institutions of each country.⁹³

Despite focusing on the rights and responsibilities of the next generation of researchers, it is clear that these rights and responsibilities are applicable regardless of the generation with which the researchers may identify. However, as it is predicted that data access and reuse will be opened at a far larger scale in the near future, awareness towards the responsibilities pertaining to access to and reuse of research data, both as providers and users, is highly expected from the next generation of researchers. It is believed that through a proper policy framework that balances the rights to access and reuse with the responsibilities as

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⁸⁷ Anne Fitzgerald, 2009, Sharing Environmental Data: The Role of an Information Policy Framework and Copyright Licensing, available at <http://www.eresearch.edu.au/docs/2009/era09_submission_122.pdf> (accessed June 20, 2011);

⁸⁸ Nicolas Suzor, 2006, Transformative Use of Copyright Material (Master’s thesis, Queensland University of Technology).

⁸⁹ Under the Australian Copyright Act, the author’s right of integrity does not apply to sound recording, but is applicable to literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and cinematography works. See Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 (Commonwealth of Australia), Sec. 195AJ, 195AK, 195AL – Division 4—Right of integrity of authorship of a work.

⁹⁰ The moral right of integrity under the U.K. CDPA does not apply to computer programs or to any computer-generated works. See Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, c. 48 (Eng.), Sec. 81(2) – Exceptions to right.

⁹¹ The author’s moral right of integrity in the United States does not apply to all authors, but is only applicable to certain authors of the specified group of works. See U.S. Code Title 17 Copyright Act of 1976, s. 106A – Rights of certain authors to attribution and integrity. See also Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (US), Sec. 101(1), 101(2) – Work of Visual Art Defined.

⁹² Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, c. 48 (Eng.), Sec. 82(1)(a), (b) – Qualification of right in certain cases.

⁹³ Uhlir and Schroder Open data for global science, 188.

data providers and data users, the next-generation researcher will be able to enjoy greater, yet well-governed, rights to access and reuse research data.

33. DISCUSSION BY THE WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS

PARTICIPANT: My question is addressed to Mr. Schaffer, but I invite everybody on the panel to comment and express their point of view. About a year ago, I read a publication of science metrics, which measures the level of scientific activity in the world, and there were comparisons of different countries. China and Turkey, which you mentioned, show a really high level of scientific activity, but what struck me more was Iran and the huge spike in scientific activities there, especially related to fundamental and natural sciences. Basically, I invite you to comment on this trend related to data-sharing policies and the global nature of data-sharing policies, open data to scientific and research information, and maybe facilitating a dialogue. I am not sure if there are any partnerships between your organizations and Islamic countries apart from Egypt, which was mentioned. I would appreciate your views.

MR. SCHAFFER: I will speak on behalf of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) and others can join. The roots of TWAS and its identity lie in its efforts to build scientific capacity. Much of the work of TWAS over the course of its existence has been devoted to investments and partnerships for capacity building. Most of that has been in training and research. As the capacity of various countries improved, we have moved increasingly toward South-South cooperation. In some areas, we see some lead countries, for example, China in Asia, South Africa in Africa, and Brazil in South America. Our hope is that we can develop South-South cooperation networks, not just in publication output but also in projects that have impact on the ground, and do that by allowing the advancing countries in the South to take the lead in South-South partnerships. One of the critical questions or issues that TWAS is examining is whether countries like China, Brazil, and India will find greater reason to ally with the United States and Europe than with other countries in the developing world. It is that kind of dynamic that is now in play for scientific projects.

DR. RUMBLE: I would like to add that if you look at the demographics of the northern African countries all the way into Pakistan, the percentage of people who are under 25 and even under 15 is really startling compared to societies such as ours. I think organizations like TWAS and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) have a unique opportunity to affect the young generation through science. There is tremendous opportunity for this generation to get turned on to science and see what it can do for them individually, as well as for the institutions that they cherish and their countries. I certainly hope that catches on.

MR. SCHAFFER: There are limits to what organizations like TWAS and UNESCO can do. Some of the discussion this morning was about politics. There are political issues that go beyond science education and training. Still, we can argue that, in some ways, the investments in science can set the stage. Education can set the stage for political change.

DR. GRIFFIN: I sponsored three workshops on building a digital library in the Middle East region. One was in 2006 at the New Alexandria Library; one in Rabat, Morocco, in 2007; and another one here in Washington, D.C., on January 24 and 25, 2011. We need to keep in mind when we are talking about individual countries in different parts of the world that there are shared cultural identities that go across national and political boundaries. The general approaches, feelings, and values regarding the way in which they receive the world and the way in which they receive the world through the scientific method is somewhat different in each of these cultures. Therefore, more communication mechanisms need to be established as an intermediate step to what we might be trying to get in the long term.

PARTICIPANT: I wanted to get to that issue of incentives that were raised in a couple of talks. It is an important issue, especially because many organizations have been talking about scientific publications and open-access publications. Some of you may remember that maybe a decade or so ago, people were encouraged to do interdisciplinary work, but many people who published in interdisciplinary journals did

not get tenure and they did not get promoted. People did not like it. I have not heard too much discussion about how to change the incentive structures so that we do not have these problems with young people.

DR. GUSTAFSSON: Traditionally we have had the habit of saying that when writing a paper or proposal, you should be able to put your work into a more general framework. It is still disciplinary and is still only related to science itself, but it has a context. I think we can say that any scientist who is worth supporting should be able to put his or her work into a more general framework related to the world today. It is hard to make it an absolute condition, but I think it could be a standard approach. I think research-funding agencies could put more emphasis on these things.

PARTICIPANT: I would like to thank Bengt Gustafsson for his opening remarks emphasizing the importance of free travel, communication, and collaboration as an element of international science. The American Physical Society (APS) has been very active in this regard. The APS has an Office of International Affairs and runs the Forum on International Physics, which follows up on international issues. I would like to share with you one experience I had as chair of the forum in 2007. You may remember that in 2007 the American Chemical Society (ACS) decided on its own that it had to expel all Iranian members. They misinterpreted some of the sanctions rules, which in fact specifically allow the exchange of open scientific literature among members around the world without being subject to sanctions, but nevertheless they expelled them. The APS, especially the Forum on International Physics, took major action and wrote many letters protesting this. As a result, the ACS backed down and reinstated the Iranians.

The interesting thing is that shortly after this event, the University and College Union of the United Kingdom decided to institute a boycott against Israeli academics. We took action against that as well. I took the opportunity to inform many colleagues and friends I had in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East of what was going on. I said if you have any comments or thoughts about this, why not write to the University and College Union and tell them what you think. I will read to you two messages that came from friends in the Middle East. The first one was from Egypt and said, “I regard the collective punishment of Israeli scientists to be unfair. In spite of the collective punishment practice by the Israeli government against Palestinians, scientists should not be punished just because of their nationality.” The second note was even more dramatic, from a very prominent Iranian scientist, president of the Iranian Physical Society and deputy minister of science in Iran, who said, “Let me express my sincere opposition to the boycott of Israeli academics that is being considered by the University and College Union. As a scientist living in the Middle East, I appreciate the move of your organization to express its unhappiness about the restrictions being made by Israeli forces on Palestinian students and academics. However, the decision made by your organization is violating the same principles that you are trying to defend. It is hard to accept that the Israeli academics are proponents of such restrictions.” These examples show that as we engage in collaborations and communications with our colleagues abroad, we become aware of incidents like this (human rights violations, academic freedom violations), and we can take action using our connections abroad to influence it.

DR. GUSTAFSSON: I certainly agree. I think you will also agree that this experience shows that this kind of activity is necessary, but persistence is also needed. In other words, a continuous effort must be made here. There is another point I also want to stress. We can hear other people claiming that this defense of universality is just in the scientific self-interest. I think that is not right, because we all believe that the efforts made would give more reward back to society.

DR. KAHN: It is not just about data. Data are the progeny of scientific activity, and it is everything that goes into that. Something that strikes me as obvious that has hardly been spoken about is the continuing divide between the natural sciences and engineering and the social sciences, which is as important for data and progress of sciences. That is one observation. The other one, which has not really come up in the

discussions very much, is that when we talk about scientific collaboration in the global context, it tends to be North-South rather than South-South. It is a continuing tragedy and very easy to establish. You simply go to a Web of Science⁹⁴ and do your analysis and you will see. The point I am making is that the South tends to collaborate first with the North rather than with the South. Changing that is certainly one of the most important challenges we have ahead of us.

DR. INYANG: Yes. I think this is one of the toughest things to change in Africa. This is precisely why I mentioned it in my presentation. There will not be movement away from that circumstance and there will not be South-South collaboration unless there is a continental-level institution to promote and facilitate South-South in Africa. For example, if we have solicitations that say we would like a university from South Africa to collaborate with a university in Senegal, it is very difficult to get that to happen, because there are many constraints like language, university systems, and so on. Also, most of the universities do not have the structure that is common in the United States. This is a big issue, and the proposed African science foundation would help in this area. Moreover, most international agencies do not have a formal research solicitation program that is specifically targeting African scientists. UNESCO is trying. Sometimes they have an African-wide research solicitation, but that pales in comparison to the enormity of issues and problems that Africa needs to confront. The aid given by the European Union and the U.S. Agency for International Development and others should at least have considered the creation of such an entity, because unless there is an entity like that, most of the people who have Ph.D.’s in Africa do not really have a place to go. Some of them migrate into government agencies, where the requirements that they use their intellect to do things are secondary to political patronage.

PARTICIPANT: We just heard a series of approaches from different sectors of the scientific community. What I would like everybody to comment on is whether they feel that the funding and the commitment of the people who could provide funding is there, or whether these are wonderful programs, wonderful approaches, and wonderful ideas, but we are so lacking in funding that progress is going to be significantly hindered.

MR. SCHAFFER: Actually, I did not mention in the presentation that TWAS has been very fortunate, because it has had base funding provided by the Italian government with very little oversight of direction. Italy basically has given TWAS core funding since its inception and has allowed it the freedom to do what it thought needed to be done to accomplish or advance its goals. Being freed from looking for core funding has enabled TWAS to take risks, explore different avenues and different opportunities knowing that its core funding and its core staff would be financially protected. I think that has made a huge difference, and it is an example in a sense of North-South cooperation at a reasonable level of effectiveness. A major part of the reason, I think, has been the funding, and then the freedom to move on the part of the organization that has received the funding.

DR. GRIFFIN: I can only speak from the experience of the digital libraries initiatives. We found that some of the most valuable long-term outcomes were those associated with process rather than simply individual basic research grants. For example, we fund working groups that develop positions on issues relevant to information management. I think that the next development that is going to have a significant effect on the way in which we think about scientific endeavor are new document-publication models. When the publication model changes from papers to actively formatted documents, when we have links to datasets and other publications, when other people can use the same dataset and see if they can replicate our experiments, we are going to have an altogether different perspective on how we do science collectively.

DR. INYANG: I think one of the things that can be done is to create continental support systems, because

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⁹⁴ Available at http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/web_of_science/

while South Africa, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, and perhaps Nigeria can have the support systems to help themselves, there are many other countries that are just too poor to support themselves. They do not necessarily see investment in science as something important.

APPENDIXES