Open Data – What do Research Communities Really Think about it?

"Facilitating open access to research data is a principle endorsed by an increasing number of countries and international organizations, and one of the priorities flagged in the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 funding framework [1][2]. But what do researchers themselves think about it? How do they perceive the increasing demand for open access and what are they doing about it? What problems do they face, and what sort of help are they looking for?

As a pan-European research data infrastructure, these are questions that are of fundamental interest to EUDAT. To better understand what researchers think, EUDAT has conducted a programme of interviews with fourteen major research communities from the fields of life sciences, Earth and atmospheric science, astrophysics, climate science, biodiversity, agricultural science, social science and humanities – a broad cross-section of European research interests. While the views of any given individual cannot be interpreted as the official position of a whole research community, they nevertheless provide useful information about the general attitude, requirements and challenges researchers face with regard to opening up their research data. In this article we report our initial conclusions from this survey."