19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Publication and Citation of Scientific Data

Open Access to Data and the 'Berlin Declaration'

Dr. Jens Klump (jens.klump@gfz-potsdam), Sabine Schneider, Dr. Joachim Wächter and the CeGIM Consortium
GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, Germany
http://continent.gfz-potsdam.de

The scientific discourse today is troubled by a structural problem in the publication process. The size of the data sets used in a scientific publication often prohibits their publication as data tables. As a result, data used as the basis of a publication are rarely published anymore. This lack of access to scientific data is an obstacle to interdisciplinary and international research, causes unnecessary duplication of research efforts and the verification of results becomes difficult, if not impossible.

In addition, cases of scientific misconduct in recent years have highlighted the importance of making scientific data accessible. In their 'Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice' the German Science Foundation adopted access to data as part of its policy. In 2003, a group of leading research institutions and research funding institutions published the 'Berlin Declaration' to promote access to data and information in science and humanities. The 'Berlin Declaration' is based on the principles of the Budapest Open Access Initiative to "[.] promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base and human reflection and to specify measures which research policy makers, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives and museums need to consider."

Policy changes are a necessary step to overcome the structural barriers in the publication process. In addition, scientists need to be convinced that it is worth the effort preparing their data for online publication. Authors would truly benefit if the publication of data became a citeable publication to add to his reputation and ranking.

A problem of making data available though the 'web' is that the location of internet resources may easily change. In most cases this means that these resources are lost to the user. Therefore, a prerequisite for data access via the internet is the use of persistent identifiers, such as DOI or URN to be able to always locate the desired dataset. In 2003/2004 a consortium of nine partners received two grants from the German Science Foundation to develop concepts on the publication and citation of scientific data (http://www.std-doi.de), and how to integrate data and publications (http://www.cegim.de). As one of the results from this project, a DOI registration agency for scientific and technical data was established at the Technical Information Library of the University of Hannover. The presentation will outline the results of these two projects.