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TOMORROW at Virtual SciDatCon 2021: Data Policy and Data Stewardship

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At Virtual SciDataCon 2021 Day Two (Tue 19 October), we have two strands and two themes: Open Science and Data Policy, and Repositories and Data Stewardship.

The sessions are listed below to make it easier to register if you have not done so already.

Strand: Open Science and Data Policy Developments 

Enhancing access to research data in the health sector, Tuesday 19 October, 11:00-12:30 UTC: REGISTER

Open to everyone, this joint CSTP-CODATA workshop, organised in the context of SciDataCon 2021 (Virtual Conference), discusses the proposed roadmap for the implementation of the OECD’s Recommendation concerning Access to Research Data from Public Funding with specific focus on applications of research data to the domains of health and climate. The Recommendation aims to establish access and global sharing of research data as a major policy priority, with the ultimate goal of making the global science system more efficient and effective.

This first session will focus on how to operationalise the OECD Recommendation in relation to health data. The accumulation of health-related data in recent years has provided significant opportunities for personalised medicine and the prospect of improved prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. These data come increasingly from wearable devices, social media and GPS-tracking mobile applications. This has consequences for data governance, ownership and ethics as data gathering occurs increasingly outside of the traditional social contract of healthcare systems with implied consent and privacy protection. The ongoing pandemic has further emphasised the importance of access to data for the purpose of rapid advancement of science, which best occurs under conditions of free flow of ideas and available data. While global sharing and collaboration of research data has reached unprecedented levels, challenges remain. Trust in at least some of the data is relatively low, and outstanding issues include the lack of specific standards, co-ordination and interoperability, as well as data quality and interpretation. To strengthen the contribution of open science to the health sector, policy makers need to ensure adequate data governance models, interoperable standards, sustainable data sharing agreements involving public sector, private sector and civil society, incentives for researchers, sustainable infrastructures, human and institutional capabilities and mechanisms for access to data across borders.

Enhancing access to research data for climate research, Tuesday 19 October, 13:00-14:30 UTC: REGISTER

This second session will focus on how to operationalise the OECD Recommendation in relation to climate data. The Science of earth and environment is emerging as the Science of environmental applications, a data-intensive discipline that integrates physical, biogeochemical, engineering, and human processes, to find solutions to climate challenges. Drastically increasing volumes of data, e.g. through high-resolution satellite images, create opportunities but also challenges for data governance, storage and ownership of these data. Further, lack of standards hamper interoperability while for some data spatial and temporal gaps exist, often exacerbated by discontinuation of remote field stations which are expensive to maintain. The resulting concerns around reliability of data need to be addressed by human capacities to interpret and interpolate existing data as well as through enhanced incentives and sustainable infrastructures for further sharing of data. For this purpose, international co-operation remains indispensable. As stipulated in the 2015 Paris Agreement, open access to all climate data is necessary to monitor global fluctuations of the climate that may start with local changes but have a global impact.

The State of Open Science, Tuesday 19 October, 16:00-17:30 UTC: REGISTER

This session will explore the State of Open Science and Open Data from a policy perspective. Four speakers will describe key developments and discuss the State of Open Science from a variety of perspectives and then engage in an open discussion with participants.  What is the state of Open Science and what should be done to build on the landmark policy developments of 2021? The speakers will discuss: the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (context, timescales, implications, how to engage and support it)! SpringerNature’s community-led approach to developing standardised data policies; Group on Earth Observation’s Data Working Group and the and the further development of GEO data sharing and data management recommendations; new initiatives for the CODATA International Data Policy Committee, including expertise, coordination and data diplomacy! The session will be introduced and chaired by Simon Hodson, CODATA Executive Director.

Strand: Repositories and Data Stewardship
 

Cross-border Collaboration in Developing Data Stewardship for Regional and Global Outreach of INFN Open Access Repositories, Tuesday 19 October, 11:00-12:30 UTC: REGISTER FOR THIS SESSION
 
The Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) has designed a prototype of Open Access Repository (www.openaccessrepository.it), which reuses the standard-based Invenio (back-end) and Zenodo (front-end) digital asset management systems (DAMS) with some extensions regarding the deployment model and the authentication. This prototype has been deployed in Ethiopia, Somalia and is in the process of being installed in Palestine, in Côte d’Ivoire and in further Middle East and African countries. Due to the same structure of the repositories and the similar academic culture in the countries, Ethiopia, Somalia, Côte d’Ivoire and Palestine are facing similar needs. Cross-border collaboration in the further development and operation of those repositories as well as on training activities for repository managers and users are key to develop the national repositories to regional and global open science repositories that empower and enable societies and act as interfaces between research and innovation. The centre piece of data that improves our world is the data steward or the data stewardship. Due to the fact that Open Access Repositories in Ethiopia, Côte d’Ivoire, Somalia and Palestine have the same starting point, the National Research and Education Networks (NREN) will initiate a discussion in order to find a way, how they could cooperate in developing a harmonised training for data stewards.

The State of Documenting and Reporting Data and Information Quality for Supporting Open Science, Tuesday 19 October, 13:00-14:30 UTC: REGISTER FOR THIS SESSION
Knowledge about the quality of data and information is important to support informed decisions on the (re)use of individual datasets and is an essential part of the ecosystem that supports open science. Data and information quality is essential for appropriate and effective use of data in research and/or applications. Especially with the emphasis on open data, as well as availability of data at very little or no cost, the data, metadata, and software are accessible to a much broader community of users, potentially across disciplines and international boundaries. Also, given the big data era, where abundant data products and services are available from a large number of sources for data-intensive applications, data quality information is especially important to ensure successful data reuse. We will explore activities and processes that contribute to planning for, improving, documenting and reporting, providing access to, and using data and information quality from various disciplines, ranging from Earth and space sciences to social sciences, covering a variety of data such as observational, experimental, model and citizen science data. The purpose of this session is to promote such information exchange and the resulting cross-discipline collaborations.

Making Your Data Center and Services Ready for AI: Case Studies, Tuesday 19 October, 16:00-17:30 UTC: REGISTER FOR THIS SESSION

Scientific data centers across the world are expected to adapt and modernize their data management to support rapidly evolving AI and machine learning-based cross domain research. Data centers and repositories are currently evaluating various strategies such as effective use of AI/ML for their data management operations and also provide AI-friendly data access services to the user community. Data operations such as data quality analysis, synthesis data product generations, data reduction where the data is generated, on-the-fly conditional queries are currently getting upgraded with the use of AI and machine learning. In addition, data centers that are successfully serving data to the broader user community are looking at improving data sharing and interoperability using AI. Although datasets may technically be interoperable, integration or communication among these datasets often fails because of a lack of cross-domain ontologies and standards, significantly impacting data sharing with inter-domain AI-based research activities. In this session, data center leaders will share their recent experience in adapting AI to improve the data management components and enable AI-friendly data services to user communities.

Virtual SciDataCon 2021 is organised by CODATA and the World Data System, the two data organisations of the International Science Council – PROGRAMME AT A GLANCE – FULL PROGRAMME – please note that registration is free, but participants must register for each session they wish to attend.