Science as an open enterprise

At the Software Sustainability Institute, we're interested in doing science properly and we're particularly interested in the findings of others investigating this area. Over the last year, Research Councils UK in partnership with JISC, the Royal Society and Sciencewise-ERC, have commissioned a public dialogue exercise on open data, which aims to engage the public with issues around open data to potentially inform future policies in this area.

The final report from the working group has now been published, along with case studies of data use and data repositories.

The report demonstrates the wide diversity of scientific data, as well as the changing landscape of computational and data science, and is an excellent overview of the area.

Six key areas for action are highlighted in the report:

1. Scientists need to be more open among themselves and with the public and media
2. Greater recognition needs to be given to the value of data gathering, analysis and communication
3. Common standards for sharing information are required to make it widely usable
4. Publishing data in a reusable form to support findings must be mandatory
5. More experts in managing and supporting the use of digital data are required
6. New software tools need to be developed to analyse the growing amount of data being gathered

The role for the Institute must be to both help bring about the culture change required to address these areas for action, and support the software developers who are providing the tools which make it easier enact these changes.

More information on the Royal Society website.