OASPA is supporting two important declarations which relate to data publication and reuse: The Hague Declaration and the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles.
Both declarations set out key considerations when using data that will lead to ethical and effective reuse by researchers, and the spread of good practices. We encourage you to read these declarations and, if your organisation hasn’t already done so, to also consider signing.
The Hague Declaration, coordinated by LIBER and drawn up in December 2014 by 25 international experts from different backgrounds, aims to foster knowledge discovery in the digital age by harnessing the power of text and data mining.
Whilst the benefits of access to data and the use of techniques such as Text and Data Mining (TDM) to analyse data have been widely acknowledged, the reality is that there are major barriers preventing access to and exploitation of data. These issues include a lack of legal certainty, restrictive licences provided by , a skills gap and a lack of infrastructure.
This situation has created a need to foster agreement across disciplines and sectors about the real benefits of TDM. We need a strategy for the way forward in terms of creating the conditions for realising these benefits in a way that ensures a positive societal impact.
The Hague Declaration, 2014
OASPA believes, as do many other organisations and individuals, that open access is about far more than just being able to read published articles. Open access removes barriers and enables reuse as widely as possible. The shared principles set out in The Hague Declaration, together with a roadmap to drive significant and sustainable change, will help to ensure that content mining is integral to policy formation and infrastructure development as we move forwards.
The Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles is a FORCE 11–led working group, made up of many different organisations, and focuses on the next step: when data is reused, what is best practice for enabling datasets to be cited, and for appropriate attribution and acknowledgement to be given.
Sound, reproducible scholarship rests upon a foundation of robust, accessible data. For this to be so in practice as well as theory, data must be accorded due importance in the practice of scholarship and in the enduring scholarly record.
The Data Citation Principles cover purpose, function and attributes of citations. These principles recognize the dual necessity of creating citation practices that are both human understandable and machine-actionable.
The principles set out the importance of published data in scholarly research, the opportunity it presents to provide credit to the author and attribution to the license holder, and that data provides essential evidence for the conclusions drawn within publication. Providing access to data through citation enhances sharing of research output and allows for others to build on that work.
