Open Research Data | League of European Research Universities (LERU)

"Open Research Data Open research data represents a revolution in the way research is conducted and LERU both notes and endorses this development. What is Open Data? Open data is data which can be released in the public domain, and which should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other forms of control. The concept of open data is not itself new; but a formalised definition is relatively new -- the intention can be summarised in the statement that "a piece of data is open if anyone is free to use, re-use, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike."1 Open research data is a component of Open Knowledge. Open Knowledge is any kind of information – “from genes to geodata and from sonnets to statistics”2 that can be freely used, re-used, and redistributed. Related to this, the Linked Data paradigm has evolved into a very promising candidate for addressing one of the biggest challenges in the area of intelligent information management: the exploitation of the Web as a platform for data and information integration in addition to document search. Benefits of Open Data By adopting an open approach, the data 1 See http://opendefinition.org/. 2 See http://okfn.org/about/vision/. resulting from research and experimentation can be freely available and shared to aid analysis and further discovery. With regard to the Spanish Cucumber E. Coli, for example, this genome was analysed within weeks of its outbreak because of a global and open effort. Data about the strain’s genome sequence were released freely over the Internet as soon as they were produced.3"