Stakeholder Values and Ecoystems

This report is the deliverable for Work Package 1 (WP1), Stakeholder Values and Ecosystems, of the EU FP7 funded project RECODE (Grant Agreement No: 321463), which focused on developing Policy Recommendations for Open Access to Research Data in Europe. WP1 focused on understanding stakeholder values and ecosystems in Open Access, dissemination and preservation in the area of scientific and scholarly data (thus not government data). The objectives of this WP were as follows: • Identify and map the diverse range of stakeholder values in Open Access data and data dissemination and preservation. • Map stakeholder values on to research ecosystems using case studies from different disciplinary perspectives. In summary, our research activities clearly found an overall drive for Open Data Access within the policy documents, which is part of a wider drive for open science in general. The values underpinning this move are the view of science as an open enterprise, where knowledge is sought and where discovery rests on scientists working together to solve specific challenges, which increasingly are becoming interdisciplinary in nature. The argument for publicly funded science to be made open to the public is also strong, although it is not often clear how this openness should be operationalised. When discussing Open Data there is a clear tendency to refer to science as a whole sector, thus there is a danger that the differences between disciplines are ignored in further policy making. Each discipline has different methods for gathering and analysing data. Data may be images, numerical, narrative, statistical and presented in small, medium or large datasets which might be discrete or interlinked. Some disciplines deal with sensitive data while others deal with data that may have IPR or legal issues. It is important that these differences be acknowledge in further policy for Open Data as it will inform the debate about whether we require subject specific requirements, or common infrastructure for Open Data Access.RECODE project was funded by the European Commission FP7 funding programme - Grant Agreement No: 32146