Sharing Research Data at the Nordic Level

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-06-25

Summary:

Use the link to access the full text article available from the open access, peer reviewed journal ScieCom info-Nordic-Baltic Forum for Scientific COmmunication. The article opens with the following statement: “In Finland open government data and data produced by public funding has been on the foreground during the past years. At the governmental level there have been several working groups dealing with these issues, one of which has specifically concentrated on opening up publicly funded data for research purposes. A continuation of this work is carried on by a project of the Ministry of Education and Culture. At the international level research funders around the world are requiring that the results of the research they have funded have to be publicly accessible. This refers both to the publications and the underlying data. In Finland the national research funding agency, the Academy of Finland, is not there yet, but is merely recommending that research articles be openly available. The Academy does require that the application for funding includes a data management plan. When we look at the general picture with regard to the availability of research data in Finland there are big differences depending on the field of research. In natural sciences and biomedicine open access to research data is the norm and the data is being deposited in the international depositories whereas in humanities and social sciences, with the exclusion of economics, open research data remains still a rarity. Even if the general approach with regard to opening up research data follows the internationally established practices of each research field, there are some issues that are specific to the Nordic countries. One of these issues relates to the vast amounts of register data contained in different population based registers which are almost identical in all the Nordic countries. These registers are an immense source of raw data for epidemiological research, population based research, economics and other fields of research where combining and analysing microdata from different sources forms the basis of research. Similarly datamining different sources of data in bioinformatics and genomics gives us new knowledge of diseases and basis for developing therapies. Unfortunately, these data reserves are currently being underutilized, since using the microdata contained in these registers for research purposes poses constantly difficulties, in particular with regard to combining data from different sources. In Finland the most difficult bottleneck has been the data stored within the National Statistics Authority. In the following we shall discuss the core legal issues in respect to accessing research data, that is the extensive copyright protection and data protection law. Finally we raise the question of how it would be possible to establish, at the Nordic level, a secure federated environment for a seamless use of register data from different sources irrespective of the place of residence of the researcher, and a way to combine this data with other data, such as data in biobanks or patient records.”

Link:

http://www.sciecom.org/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5512/4834

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.psi oa.gold oa.licensing oa.mining oa.government oa.ssh oa.mandates oa.legislation oa.copyright oa.interoperability oa.funders oa.privacy oa.encouragement oa.finland oa.data.analysis oa.repositories.data oa.stem oa.libre oa.policies oa.journals oa.data oa.repositories

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

06/25/2012, 17:22

Date published:

06/25/2012, 17:28