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On 23-24 September 2009 an international discussion workshop was held in Berlin, prepared and organised by Knowledge Exchange. The main focus of the workshop was on the benefits, challenges and obstacles of re-using data from a researcher’s perspective. The most important message from the wide variety of presentations was that successful reuse not only requires efforts directed at the technical issues, but also at providing incentives for researchers, both to share and re-use.
Incorporated data sharing and re-use
These incentives can be provided by funding opportunities, but also by incorporating data sharing and re-use in the research assessment. The issue of data re-use would be a lot more relevant to researchers if publishers, for example, asked authors for data to underpin their publications. Alternatively researchers’ data being cited in a journal should be rewarded.
Agreed standards are needed
Technical aspects should also be addressed, e.g. by supporting data storage and sharing facilities. This requires not only specialised staff but also agreed standards (metadata, ontologies) which will allow different datasets to be evaluated, compared and combined. Researchers will need to be trained, but awareness will also need to be created at a higher level. Bottom-up and top-down approaches need to work in unison.
Challenges across disciplines
At the workshop the use cases presented by researchers from a variety of disciplines were supplemented by two keynotes and selected presentations by specialists from infrastructure institutions, publishers, and national and European funding bodies. Thanks to this broad approach it became clear that certain challenges and obstacles are comparable across disciplines and organisations.
Time to ambitious international cooperation
As a general recommendation the participants agreed that it is time to cooperate in more ambitious international activities to establish reliable and sustainable support for initiatives in the field of data related research infrastructure – as Prof. John Wood (Imperial College London) put it in his keynote: “You can no longer separate the data management issue from the planning and running of research infrastructures”.
The workshop was organised by the working group Primary Research Data of Knowledge Exchange.
For further information on the workshop please see:
http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=324.
Please contact: Keith Russell (Knowledge Exchange office) on +31 30 2346600
or kru@knowledge-exchange.info.
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