RSS pledges support for proposed open research data agreement | StatsLife

"The RSS has expressed its support of a new agreement on open research data issued by the Open Research Data Forum, whose members include Research Councils UK, JISC, the Wellcome Trust and Universities UK. The draft Concordat on Open Research Data aims to ensure that research data gathered in the UK is openly available wherever possible, but within relevant legal, ethical and regulatory frameworks. Responding to a call for feedback on the draft (PDF), the RSS has expressed support, considering it ‘well thought through, and comprehensive with regard to its remit’. Much of the Concordat concurs with various aspects of the RSS's Data Manifesto, such as its call for faster progress on opening up data to boost innovation. ‘Open data and access to research needs to be prioritised by the government and by our academic and research industries, especially public access to research that is supported by public funding,’ the RSS states in its response. ‘Progress in these areas should also help to address the “reproducibility crisis”, where advances in science are limited by a lack of collaboration on the underlying data.’ The RSS acknowledges that there are risks to privacy that can arise from implementing new systems, and therefore welcomes the Forum’s principles that the use of data should conform to legal, ethical and regulatory frameworks. ‘Implementation must therefore be well considered so that the benefits of open access are widely seen to outweigh any risks,’ the RSS concludes ..."