---
title: "Open scientific data"
chunk: 11/11
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_scientific_data"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:49:42.862927+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The Unesco recommendation of Open Science approved in November 2021 defines open science infrastructures as "shared research infrastructures that are needed to support open science and serve the needs of different communities" Open science infrastructures have been recognized as a major factor in the implementation and the development of data sharing policies.
Leading infrastructures for open scientific data include data repositories, data analysis platforms, indexes, digitized libraries, or digitized archives. Infrastructures ensure that individual researchers and institutions do not entirely support the costs of publishing, maintaining, and indexing datasets. They are also critical stakeholders in the definition and adoption of open data standards, especially regarding licensing or documentation.
By the end of the 1990s, the creation of public scientific computing infrastructure became a major policy issue: "The lack of infrastructure to support release and reuse was acknowledged in some of the earliest policy reports on data sharing." The first wave of web-based scientific projects in the 1990s and the early 2000s revealed critical issues of sustainability. As funding was allocated on a specific period, critical databases, online tools or publishing platforms could hardly be maintained. Project managers were faced with a valley of death "between grant funding and ongoing operational funding". After 2010, the consolidation and expansion of commercial, scientific infrastructure such as the acquisition of the open repositories Digital Commons and SSRN by Elsevier had further entailed calls to secure "community-controlled infrastructure". In 2015, Cameron Neylon, Geoffrey Bilder and Jenifer Lin defined an influential series of Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure that has been endorsed by leading infrastructures such as Crossref, OpenCitations or Data Dryad By 2021, public services and infrastructures for research have largely endorsed open science as an integral part of their activity and identity: "open science is the dominant discourse to which new online services for research refer." According to the 2021 Roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), major legacy infrastructures in Europe have embraced open science principles. "Most of the Research Infrastructures on the ESFRI Roadmap are at the forefront of Open Science movement and make important contributions to the digital transformation by transforming the whole research process according to the Open Science paradigm."
Open science infrastructure represents a higher level of commitment to data sharing. They rely on significant and recurrent investments to ensure that data is effectively maintained and documented and "add value to data through metadata, provenance, classification, standards for data structures, and migration".  Furthermore, infrastructures need to be integrated into the norms and expected uses of the scientific communities they mean to serve: "The most successful become reference collections that attract longer-term funding and can set standards for their communities" Maintaining open standards is one of the main challenge identified by leading European open infrastructures, as it implies choosing among competing standards in some case, as well as ensuring that the standards are correctly updated and accessible through APIs or other endpoints.
The conceptual definition of open science infrastructures has been influenced mainly by the analysis of Elinor Ostrom on the commons and, more specifically, on the knowledge commons. In accordance with Ostrom, Cameron Neylon understates that open infrastructures are not only characterized by the management of a pool of shared resources but also by the elaboration of joint governance and norms. The diffusion of open scientific data also raise stringent issues of governance. In regards to the determination of the ownership of the data, the adoption of free license and the enforcement of regulations in regard to privacy, "continual negotiation is necessary" and involve a wide range of stakeholders.
Beyond their integration in specific scientific communities, open science infrastructure have strong ties with the open source and the open data movements. 82% of the European infrastructures surveyed by SPARC claim to have partially built open source software and 53% have their entire technological infrastructure in open source. Open science infrastructures preferably integrate standards from other open science infrastructures. Among European infrastructures: "The most commonly cited systems – and thus essential infrastructure for many – are ORCID, Crossref, DOAJ, BASE, OpenAIRE, Altmetric, and Datacite, most of which are not-for-profit". Open science infrastructure are then part of an emerging "truly interoperable Open Science commons" that hold the premise of "researcher-centric, low-cost, innovative, and interoperable tools for research, superior to the present, largely closed system."

== See also ==

== References ==

== Bibliography ==

== External links ==
Research Data Canada Archived 2024-02-10 at the Wayback Machine
Open Data In Science article (P Murray-Rust)
Open Data about monitoring of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest
OpenWetWare
Open ConnectomeProject
LinkedScience.org
Collective Mind Repository for computer engineering