Denton Declaration: An Open Data Manifesto | Open Access @ UNT

"On May 22, 2012 at the University of North Texas, a group of technologists and librarians, scholars and researchers, university administrators, and other stakeholders gathered to discuss and articulate best practices and emerging trends in research data management.  This declaration bridges the converging interests of these stakeholders and promotes collaboration, transparency, and accountability across organizational and disciplinary boundaries....

PRINCIPLES

1. Open access to research data benefits society, and facilitates decision making for public policy.
2. Publicly available research data helps promote a more cost-effective and efficient research environment by reducing redundancy of efforts.
3. Access to research data ensures transparency in the deployment of public funds for research and helps safeguard public good will toward research.
4. Open access to research data facilitates validation of research results, allows data to be improved by identifying errors, and enables the reuse and analysis of legacy data using new techniques developed through advances and changing perceptions.
5. Funding entities should support reliable long-term access to research data as a component of research grants due to the benefits that accrue from the availability of research data.
6. Data preservation should involve sufficient identifying characteristics and descriptive information so that others besides the data producer can use and analyze the data.
7. Data should be made available in a timely manner; neither too soon to ensure that researchers to benefit from their labor, nor too late to allow for verification of the results.
8. A reasonable plan for the disposition of research data should be established as part of data management planning, rather than arbitrarily claiming the need for preservation in perpetuity.
9. Open access to research data should be a central goal of the lifecycle approach to data management, with consideration given at each stage of the data lifecycle to what metadata, data architecture, and infrastructure will be necessary to support data discoverability, accessibility, and long-term stewardship.
10. The costs of cyberinfrastructure should be distributed among the stakeholders – including researchers, agencies, and institutions – in a way that supports a long-term strategy for research data acquisition, collection, preservation, and access.
11. The academy should adapt existing frameworks for tenure and promotion, and merit-based incentives to account for alternative forms of publication and research output including data papers, public data sets, and digital products. Value inheres in data as a standalone research output.
12. The principles of open access should not be in conflict with the intellectual property rights of researchers, and a culture of citation and acknowledgement should be cultivated rigorously and conscientiously among all practitioners.
13. Open access should not compromise the confidentiality of research subjects, and will comply with principles of data security defined by HIPAA, FERPA, and other privacy guidelines...."