Sharing the results of publicly funded research

Open Access to Research Data – Timeline

April 30, 2015 in PASTEUR4OA, researchdata

As part of our work for the PASTEUR4OA Project Open Knowledge will be writing a briefing paper on Open Access to research data, to form one in a series of advocacy papers. Sharing the raw data behind published outputs is a key complementary activity to Open Access and the paper will give an overview of the benefits, challenges, policy developments and European Commission directions in this area.

Image CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay

Image CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay

We will be including a simple visual European timeline showing key dates and initiatives in the move towards Open Access to research data. Unfortunately one-page of A4 won’t do the timeline justice so I wanted to share my findings with you and ask if there are any significant events that have been missed!

This timeline builds on Peter Suber’s excellent Open Access timeline and the EC Open Science (Open Access) chronology, and adds in complimentary dates.

Sharing scientific results, or other forms of research, is not a new idea. The great Isaac Newton famously said of his own research methods: “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants”, a quote built on an expression from the 12th century. Robert King Merton, one of key researchers leading in the sociology of science, advocated in as early as 1942 that the results of research should be freely accessible to all. “Each researcher must contribute to the “common pot” and give up intellectual property rights to allow knowledge to move forward.” The concept of Open Access to scientific data available in a digital form is attributed to the formation of the World Data Center system, created to archive and distribute data collected from the observational programmes of the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year. For the International Council of Science (ICSU) who ran the system the idea of data sharing was to counteract the risk of data loss and to maximize data accessibility.

1942

  • Robert King Merton, one of key researchers leading in the sociology of science, advocated in as early as 1942 that the results of research should be freely accessible to all. “Each researcher must contribute to the “common pot” and give up intellectual property rights to allow knowledge to move forward.”

1957

  • The concept of Open Access to scientific data available in a digital form is attributed to the formation of the World Data Center system, created to archive and distribute data collected from the observational programmes of the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year. For the International Council of Science (ICSU) who ran the system the idea of data sharing was to counteract the risk of data loss and to maximize data accessibility.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Data_Center]

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

11 responses to “Open Access to Research Data – Timeline”

  1. Christopher Brown says:

    You might want to include the UK Research Data Discovery Service project (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/uk-research-data-discovery) and its initial pilot, as discovery of research data held in HEIs’ and Data Centres’ repositories is key to sharing, reuse, etc. As well as the project page, the blog will contain status updates on the project, which runs from Nov 2014 to July 2016 (http://rdds.jiscinvolve.org/wp/).

  2. Marieke Guy says:

    Thanks Chris – now added.

  3. mokas01 says:

    There was already this try from Simmons : http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Timeline
    Shouldn’t you try and merge ?

  4. Marieke Guy says:

    Thanks for the other suggestions.

    In the briefing paper I’m working on we are focusing on EU related documents and outputs.

    I won’t be able to merge everything together but am happy to link to as many related timelines as we can find. (See my post on this related to Open Education timelines http://education.okfn.org/open-education-timelines-just-like-buses/%5D

  5. […] Sharing the results of publicly funded research  […]

  6. […] Open Access to Research Data – Timeline | Open Access Working Group […]

  7. Laurence Horton says:

    Don’t know if this is more a data sharing than open data, but a number of the main data archives were established in the 1960s. Dates :

  8. Robert King Merton, one of key researchers leading in the sociology of science, advocated in as early as 1942 that the results of research should be freely accessible to all. “Each researcher must contribute to the “common pot” and give up intellectual property rights to allow knowledge to move forward.”

    I doubt that is an accurate quote. The other place it appears is http://www.paristechreview.com/2013/03/29/brief-history-open-data/ in which it is not a quote.

    I read Merton’s 1942 article and the text is not to be found, not even “common pot”. But here is a good quote from the article:

    “Communism,” in the nontechnical and extended sense of common ownership of goods, is a second integral element of the scientific ethos. The substantive findings of science are a product of social collaboration and are assigned to the community. They constitute a common heritage in which the equity of the individual producer is severely limited. […] Property rights in science are whittled down to a bare minimum by the rationale of the scientific ethic. The scientist’s claim to “his” intellectual “property” is limited to that of recognition and esteem which, if the institution functions with a modicum of efficiency, is roughly commensurate with the significance of the increments brought to the common fund of knowledge. […] The institutional conception of science as part of the public domain is linked with the imperative for the communication of findings. Secrecy is the antithesis of this norm; full and open communication its enactment. […] The communism of the scientific ethos is incompatible with the definition of technology as “private property” in a capitalistic economy.

    English Wikipeidia on the (several) Mertonian norms.

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