The Case for Open Scientific Data: Theory, Benefits, Costs and Opportunities

This chapter provides the theoretical, historical and economic background for the study of open scientific data.It consists of five key sections: 1.The emergence of open scientific data 2. Science and scientific data in the evolving knowledge economy 3.The envisaged benefits of open scientific data 4.The costs of developing open data infrastructures 5. Open data and commercialisation of public research digital technologies to share tasks, knowledge and research outcomes.Working in real time, digital technologies help to speed the creation of knowledge and its dissemination.This revolution in scientific communications and these new means for collaboration open the way to a dramatic increase in the social value of science.Good data enables good science, and digital technologies provide the means for acquiring, transmitting, storing, analysing and reusing massive volumes of data.In embracing these technologies, research organisations and researchers are extending the frontiers of science.This is open innovation in science, or open science.Open science is part of the broader access to knowledge movement that advocates the distribution of educational, intellectual, scientific, creative and government works online through permissive licences by the right holders (open access) [45][46][47][48][49][50][51].More specifically, open science refers to online scientific resources, whether data or a publication, that anyone can access, use, reuse and distribute without permission from any other party.It may be that those resources have been placed in the public domain and so are not subject to any legal control.Or it may be that permission has already been granted to use, reuse and distribute the resources.Whichever case applies, the ability to use and build upon such resources simply requires access to them. 1 While the definition and licencing mechanisms for open access are new, the sharing of scientific data in digital formats predates the emergence of the open access to knowledge movement and also predates the World Wide Web [54].Open access publishing has roots in electronic publishing experiments that began in the 1970s [55] and led to the adoption of the Budapest Open Access Declaration in 2002 [56].The origins of open access to data go back even further.The World Data Center was established in 1955 to collect and to distribute data generated by the observational programs of the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year.Scientists from 67 countries participated in the data collection that year and agreed to share data generated from cosmic ray, climatology, oceanography, Earth's atmosphere and magnetic research, with a view to making the data available in machine-readable formats [57, 58].One year later, in 1959, representatives of 13 governments agreed on scientific collaboration enabled by a free sharing of scientific observations and results from Antarctica [59].In 1966, the Committee on Data in Science and Technology (CODATA) was founded by the International Council for Science to promote cooperation in data management and use [60].In 1982, the Internet era began and the open research data made a giant leap forward shortly thereafter.In the 1990s, several Internet-based open research data