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Marie Weiel-Potyagaylo Post 1

• 2 March 2020, 12:19 PM

Personal concerns about open and/or FAIR data

Personally, my biggest concern with respect to open and/or FAIR data is that I would (try to) publish some data which I actually do not own. As a computational biophysics group, we sometimes work with experimental data, which always comes from external sources and would have to be published along with our e.g. simulated data for transparency and reproducibility.

Possible answers or workarounds suggested are:

  • Start publishing those bits of the data you own for sure.
  • Try to clear things up and find out who actually owns the data.
  • Going up the management chain can help. If you can find someone who clearly has management over the area the dataset belongs to they can either assign an owner or give permission.
  • Get someone very senior to appoint someone who can make decisions about apparently “orphaned” data.
Emma Harris

Emma Harris
Moderator
Post 2 in reply to 1

• 3 March 2020, 10:56 AM

Hi

Great questions. I think the workarounds you suggest are pretty accurate. 

The problem with FAIR data is that not all data is FAIR and Open so, as you rightly point out, it can be difficult to publish when clear licensing is not available. 

Obviously you can just cite other data sets if you know who created them. If they are orphaned then yes you need to find someone who has the authority to grant you permission to publish. You can see now why we asked you to check your institutions data policy last week, it can be really helpful in cases like this if they have some rules or guidance on issues such as this. 

If it's not possible to find the owner, and you're not allowed to publish the data, you could publish metadata saying that the owner is unknown and the use rights are unknown too (hence why it is closed access). This would be still in terms of FAIR.