Report: Legal Status of Research Data in four european countries

It is difficult for researchers and those supporting them to understand how open access to research data can be legally obtained and re-used. This is due to the fact that European and national laws vary and researchers work across national boundaries.

A possible approach to providing clarity would be that researchers assign a licence to their data. This practice could be incorporated in a code of conduct for researchers.
The report ‘The legal status of research data in the Knowledge Exchange partner countries’ was commissioned by Knowledge Exchange (KE) and written by the Centre for Intellectual Property Law (CIER). The aim of the report was to provide clarity by analysing the intellectual property regimes in the four KE countries and European database law.

Moreover, the report provides three recommendations to achieve better access: making contractual arrangements with authors, harmonisation of European copyright law and setting up of policies on commercial interests.

You’ll find the full report here. The the four national reports are available here.

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Reference Book “Research Data Management” published

In the course of Frankfurt Book Fair, a new reference book for reasearch data managenent was announced.

The reference book,  published by Prof. Büttner, Prof. Hobohm (both FH Potsdam) and Lars Müller, gains insights in the management of research data in different scientific communities.

Beside other topics the reference book deals with the lifecycle of research data, data policies, judical subjects, metadata and standards, repositories for research data, digital preservation and the  publishing of data.

The refence book is published by Bock and Herchen and additionally is available as open acess publication.

You can download the reference book here.

Drivers and barriers in data sharing [Update]

The ODE project has published a collection of success stories and lessons learned in the area of data sharing, re-use and preservation.

Ten stories have been selected from a series of interviewed carried out to establish a baseline for the drivers and barriers in data exchange.

You will find the full report here.

Update 25-10-2011:
Another report of the ODE project (“Integration of Data and Publications“) is related to the scientific communication and shows actual trends – e.g. it describes how libraries and publishers are dealing with research data and how they make them accessible.

One example: the report lists five abstract researcher requirements for integrating data and publication:

1. Researchers need somewhere to put data and make it safe for reuse
2. Researchers need to control its sharing and access
3. Researchers need the ability to integrate data and publication
4. Researchers need to get credit for data as a first class research object
5. Researchers need someone to pay for the costs of data availability and re-use

Quite interesting findings for our EDaWaX-Project- especially requirement 3 is a goal of our project…

An executive summary of the ODE-report is available here.

Image Source: Opportunities for Data Exchange – Project (ODE). Cover of the report: “Ten Tales of Drivers and Barriers in Data Sharing. Alliance for Permanent Access (APA). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/