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Access to Research Data from Public Funding
Introduction at the press conference
By Maria van der Hoeven, Minister of Education, Culture and Science,
The Netherlands
Ladies and gentlemen,
I’m here to compliment the CSTP on putting the issues on access to research data from public funding on the agenda. Our researchers tell us that a tsunami of digital research data is heading our way. CSTP is just the right forum to help channelling the tsunami into the data-artery that will feed our future global science system.
The rising flood of digital research data brings new opportunities as well as risks, benefits and costs. To minimise the risks and the costs, and maximise the opportunities and benefits requires new agreements and arrangements between researchers and their organisations on the national and international levels. The central issue will be access, the necessary arrangements could be called Data Access Regimes.
At the ministerial meeting a most interesting research programme in neuro-informatics was discussed. It will almost be impossible to take up this programme and collect the diversity of necessary research data from all over the world without fully functioning Data Access Regimes.
The OECD is the most authoritative and effective intergovernmental forum responsible for science policy so the OECD is the logical starting point to establish the global framework in which our researchers and their organisations can model their more detailed regulation of Access to Data. Formulating workable international Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data will require quite some additional awareness raising, agenda setting and implementation. The way CSTP has handled the issues so far makes me confident we will succeed in strengthening the international consensus already reached.
One of CSTP’s policy makers once stated:
Yesterday’s scientists studied nature, but today’s scientists study digital data.
Yesterday Sir Isaac Newton did not need more than a pencil and a pad to process his observational data into the ground breaking scientific laws we know him by. But today the next step in physics demands a Large Hadron Collider, to be built by CERN, that will produce 12 to 14 Petabytes of digital data per year, the full capacity of about 16 million CD-ROMs, to be analysed by some 6000 researchers, scattered around the world, but tightly knit by the Grid computer-network of our global science system.
When we see figures of that magnitude,
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We see the rising cost of data collection and management as well as the ICT infrastructures.
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We see that new standards of quality control and inter-operability are necessary.
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We see an increase in risks to national security and the privacy of citizens.
In workable data Access Regimes these drawbacks will by far be outweighed by the tremendous new benefits in the quality and productivity of science.
One of our researchers, he is a logician, has characterised information as the only resource that will grow by its use. Information and data resources will not be depleted by use, on the contrary. You can have your cake and eat it as well, again and again. The same data can be used over and again by many people at many different times and places and this will only increase their value.
It is obvious that Open Access will be a necessary condition to realise the potential of research data as the floating capital of global science. Governments of OECD countries spend about $650 billion annually on research, expanded use of data sources could impressively increase the taxpayers' value of this expenditure.
There is far more than the economic value of Open Access: Openness represents a very fundamental scientific value. Progress of science is dependent on a free flow of ideas, information and knowledge, scrutinised and debated by an open forum of peers.
OECD countries fund science as a public good. Individual citizens, their institutions and firms do have open access to the results of science in specialised publications. The openness of science facilitates creativity as well as accountability: quality, reliability, productivity and efficiency are open to public review.
The ICT environment necessitates an updating of this scientific openness and open access to the sources of research, the data will be a keystone in this.
In my opinion one can hardly overestimate the potential impact of the declaration on Science and Society.
Thank you.
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