·        Report on current practices concerning Access to and Sharing of Research data and their underlying principles on the basis of case studies; ·        Report on the effects of selected current data sharing practices on the quality of research and the progress of science; ·        Suggest principles for making policy on data sharing within the relevant national and international policies and regulatory frameworks. Unstated agenda is to promote US model throughout the world (full/open access) Our goals (speaking on behalf of the individuals gathered here) are actually two fold

“Science and society are swimming in data, starting with our ability to collect it. We see that across all scales of physical and biological phenomena under investigation, across disciplines, and across national boundaries.” “And the handling of data just begins with it collection, often there are needs to refine, reduce, deposit in databases. Then the real work begins, of data federation, analysis, mining, and mediating across domain knowledge.” “As a side note, one of the challenges here is the ability to bring data together across various disciplines – this will be addressed in one of the discussion sections.”

“And this global connectivity allows scientists like Mark Ellisman to control and obtain information from a microscopy in Japan”. Actually, Mark has been a pioneer in telescience, leading the charge to take advantage of the network and the larger microscopes in Japan to advance our science.” Science, Technology, And Research Transit Access Point, or STAR TAP, About STAR TAP The Science, Technology, And Research Transit Access Point, or STAR TAP, is a proving ground for long-term interconnection and interoperability of advanced international networking. STAR TAP is made possible by major funding from the US National Science Foundation to the University of Illinois at Chicago. See: http://www.startap.net

TeraGrid: 13.6TF, 6.8TB memory, 79 TB internal disk, 576 TB network disk, 40 Gbs optical backbone. “In a recent award by NSF, NSF has boldly move to expedite the building of this cyberinfrastructure, and build a TeraGrid”. “This teragrid will expand all of the technology components we discussed (compute, data, networking). The challenge will be the associated software development – by the PACI partnerships, and by associated projects by NSF and other agencies such as NIH”. NOTE: This is (part of) the US Investment in the grid. EU / UK are heavily investing in this, as are the Asian countries, through organizations such as APGrid, or an initiative we in California are launching.

* Two studies on the international state of affairs by Paul Wouters from the Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services (NIWI): -         a Quick Scan of the current relevant regulation on data sharing as formalised and practised by a selection of research organisations in the United States. -         a 'Mini Survey' of the member organisations of ESF, and similar organisations in Japan, Australia and Canada) to define the issues in data sharing currently felt as most urgent in the other OECD countries. (published in March and September 2002.) * The start of a research project combining scientific research and policy research into data-sharing (treating ao. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility GBIF) by Geof  Bowker and Kathleen Casey (University of California, San Diego) funded by NSF. It treats the subject from the viewpoint of science policy as well as from a social informatics perspective.(The Report shall be finalised in Spring 2003.) -         A study by Colin Reddy on data policies and management at the international ‘Big Science’ organisations CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) subsidiary of EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory). -         A study by Anne Beaulieu on the role of inter-collegial trust in data sharing in the practice of small scale data sets at the fMRI Data Center in Dartmouth, New Hampshire; (To be published finished by the end of  September 2002.)

* The SYMPOSIUM ON THE ROLE OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL DATA AND INFORMATION IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN * The 18th International CODATA Conference on 29 September – 3 October 2002 in Montreal * The 4th Global Research Village Conference in Warsawa on 10-11 October 2002

Bits of Power: 1997 assesses state of international exchange (natural sciences), trends, pressure toward commercialization of scientific data. Treats to public good  uses of scientific data

http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/ses/common/archive.htm

The National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science gave a joint statement in the same House discussion on database protection (Lederberg 1999). “Thus, freedom of inquiry, the open availability of scientific data, and the open publication of results are cornerstones of our research system that US law and tradition have long upheld”. Hence, full and open access to data is the basic principle for  many scientific institutions in the U.S. Lederberg, citing the Bits of Power report (NAS 1997), defined full and open as follows: “by full and open we mean that data and information derived from publicly funded research are made available with as few restrictions as possible, on a non-discriminatory basis, for no more than the cost of reproduction and dissemination”.

Note that these are interdependent contexts that need consideration for policy (as you do in the summary page) Technical: Robustness and flexibility of infrastructure; integration of data (semantic mediation), interoperability and metadata standards, infrastructure development (hardware, database design, grid software) Institutional and Management: Funding Agencies, government departments, governing boards of large activities; universities and research institutes Legal and Policy: International and national laws and policies directly affect data access and data sharing practices Cultural and Behavioral: Rewards (promotion, financial) within university systems; in community (value of sharing)

These contexts are overlapping: for each of these issues to be solved, the overlapping contexts must be addressed.

For more on the Role of Governments in the Digital Age, see Stiglitz, Orzag and Orzag at http://www.ccianet.org/govt_comp.php3. In particular note the following three
Principle 1: Providing public data and information is a proper governmental role
Principle 2: Improving the efficiency with which governmental services are provided is a proper governmental role
Principle 3: The support of basic research is a proper governmental role

Biomedical Applications (functioning of the brain, the design of pharmaceuticals) Environmental Informatics Infrastructure a step on the road called for by National Research Council publication. And my word of encouragement: think globally in your deliberations. “Today, more than ever, the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security and ecology are disappearing. You often cannot explaining one without referring to the others, and you cannot explain the whole without reference to them all” (Friedman, p20) .. It’s the connections that matter