Open data ‘tougher’ than open access and needs ‘mindset change’
As the open access movement shifts its focus from sharing publications to the “tougher” question of sharing data, universities must shift the focus of their reward systems from publications to other modes of knowledge creation, according to the signatories to a new pact.
University of Sydney deputy vice-chancellor Duncan Ivison said a radical change in mindset about the value of academic contributions to research was needed to achieve an equally radical “opening up” of the scientific method.
“How do we reward people for putting up their data and making it accessible prior to publication – in a sense, making the journal article less important than engagement around the scientific questions?” asked Professor Ivison, who chairs the research committee of Australia’s Group of Eight universities.
“The methodologies, the semantics, the descriptions of the things you’re measuring and observing – how do we make that as valued as the actual publication?”
The influence of academic recognition is highlighted in the Sorbonne declaration on research data rights, recently signed by the Go8, Russell Group, League of European Research Universities (Leru) and six other research-intensive university networks.
The nine groups vowed to help their members in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia develop “appropriate recognition” for researchers who made their data “findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable”.
UNSW Sydney environmental scientist Richard Kingsford said open data was “one of the big challenges” for society. “Governments and universities have spent enormous amounts of public money collecting data which sometimes you can’t find,” he said.
“As we get better computational ability to crunch large datasets, significant insights can come out of having access to that data, perhaps never thought of by the people who collected it.”
But he said it would be difficult to resolve the academic recognition issues, notwithstanding initiatives to ensure that people who harvested data were properly cited. “Universities live and breathe on publications,” Professor Kingsford said.
“If you look at universities’ reward structures in terms of careers and promotions, collecting data is not really going to curry much favour on a selection panel.”
The new pact asks governments and funders to develop consistent policies to support the sharing and reuse of research data and to prevent commercial platforms from “locking in” data on their own servers, and also asks for additional financial support for data management.
Sorbonne University president and Leru chairman Jean Chambaz said data-sharing multiplied its societal and economic impact.
