Report by Gillian Diebold: “In the United States, access to many public and private services, including those in the financial, educational, and health-care sectors, are intricately linked to data. But adequate data is not collected equitably from all Americans, creating a new challenge: the data divide, in which not everyone has enough high-quality data collected about them or their communities and therefore cannot benefit from data-driven innovation. This report provides an overview of the data divide in the United States and offers recommendations for how policymakers can address these inequalities…(More)”.
Making Government Data Publicly Available: Guidance for Agencies on Releasing Data Responsibly
Report by Hugh Grant-Chapman, and Hannah Quay-de la Vallee: “Government agencies rely on a wide range of data to effectively deliver services to the populations with which they engage. Civic-minded advocates frequently argue that the public benefits of this data can be better harnessed by making it available for public access. Recent years, however, have also seen growing recognition that the public release of government data can carry certain risks. Government agencies hoping to release data publicly should consider those potential risks in deciding which data to make publicly available and how to go about releasing it.
This guidance offers an introduction to making data publicly available while addressing privacy and ethical data use issues. It is intended for administrators at government agencies that deliver services to individuals — especially those at the state and local levels — who are interested in publicly releasing government data. This guidance focuses on challenges that may arise when releasing aggregated data derived from sensitive information, particularly individual-level data.
The report begins by highlighting key benefits and risks of making government data publicly available. Benefits include empowering members of the general public, supporting research on program efficacy, supporting the work of organizations providing adjacent services, reducing agencies’ administrative burden, and holding government agencies accountable. Potential risks include breaches of individual privacy; irresponsible uses of the data by third parties; and the possibility that the data is not used at all, resulting in wasted resources.
In light of these benefits and risks, the report presents four recommended actions for publishing government data responsibly:
- Establish data governance processes and roles;
- Engage external communities;
- Ensure responsible use and privacy protection; and
- Evaluate resource constraints.
These key considerations also take into account federal and state laws as well as emerging computational and analytical techniques for protecting privacy when releasing data, such as differential privacy techniques and synthetic data. Each of these techniques involves unique benefits and trade-offs to be considered in context of the goals of a given data release…(More)”.
OSTP Issues Guidance to Make Federally Funded Research Freely Available Without Delay
The White House: “Today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) updated U.S. policy guidance to make the results of taxpayer-supported research immediately available to the American public at no cost. In a memorandum to federal departments and agencies, Dr. Alondra Nelson, the head of OSTP, delivered guidance for agencies to update their public access policies as soon as possible to make publications and research funded by taxpayers publicly accessible, without an embargo or cost. All agencies will fully implement updated policies, including ending the optional 12-month embargo, no later than December 31, 2025.
This policy will likely yield significant benefits on a number of key priorities for the American people, from environmental justice to cancer breakthroughs, and from game-changing clean energy technologies to protecting civil liberties in an automated world.
For years, President Biden has been committed to delivering policy based on the best available science, and to working to ensure the American people have access to the findings of that research. “Right now, you work for years to come up with a significant breakthrough, and if you do, you get to publish a paper in one of the top journals,” said then-Vice President Biden in remarks to the American Association for Cancer Research in 2016. “For anyone to get access to that publication, they have to pay hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars to subscribe to a single journal. And here’s the kicker — the journal owns the data for a year. The taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research every year, but once it’s published, nearly all of that taxpayer-funded research sits behind walls. Tell me how this is moving the process along more rapidly.” The new public access guidance was developed with the input of multiple federal agencies over the course of this year, to enable progress on a number of Biden-Harris Administration priorities.
“When research is widely available to other researchers and the public, it can save lives, provide policymakers with the tools to make critical decisions, and drive more equitable outcomes across every sector of society,” said Dr. Alondra Nelson, head of OSTP. “The American people fund tens of billions of dollars of cutting-edge research annually. There should be no delay or barrier between the American public and the returns on their investments in research.”..(More)“.
Big, Open Data for Development: A Vision for India
Paper by Sam Asher, Aditi Bhowmick, Alison Campion, Tobias Lunt and Paul Novosad: “The government generates terabytes of data directly and incidentally in the operation of public programs. For intrinsic and instrumental reasons, these data should be made open to the public. Intrinsically, a right to government data is implicit in the right to information. Instrumentally, open government data will improve policy, increase accountability, empower citizens, create new opportunities for private firms, and lead to development and economic growth. A series of case studies demonstrates these benefits in a range of other contexts. We next examine how government can maximize social benefit from government data. This entails opening administrative data as far upstream in the data pipeline as possible. Most administrative data can be minimally aggregated to protect privacy, while providing data with high geographic granularity. We assess the status quo of the Government of India’s data production and dissemination pipeline, and find that the greatest weakness lies in the last mile: making government data accessible to the public. This means more than posting it online; we describe a set of principles for lowering the access and use costs close to zero. Finally, we examine the use of government data to guide policy in the COVID-19 pandemic. Civil society played a key role in aggregating, disseminating, and analyzing government data, providing analysis that was essential to policy response. However, key pieces of data, like testing rates and seroprevalence distribution, were unnecessarily withheld by the government, data which could have substantially improved the policy response. A more open approach to government data would have saved many lives…(More)”.
Forest data governance as a reflection of forest governance: Institutional change and endurance in Finland and Canada
Paper by Salla Rantala, Brent Swallow, Anu Lähteenmäki-Uutela and Riikka Paloniemi: “The rapid development of new digital technologies for natural resource management has created a need to design and update governance regimes for effective and transparent generation, sharing and use of digital natural resource data. In this paper, we contribute to this novel area of investigation from the perspective of institutional change. We develop a conceptual framework to analyze how emerging natural resource data governance is shaped by related natural resource governance; complex, multilevel systems of actors, institutions and their interplay. We apply this framework to study forest data governance and its roots in forest governance in Finland and Canada. In Finland, an emphasis on open forest data and the associated legal reform represents the instutionalization of a mixed open data-bioeconomy discourse, pushed by higher-level institutional requirements towards greater openness and shaped by changing actor dynamics in relation to diverse forest values. In Canada, a strong institutional lock-in around public-private partnerships in forest management has engendered an approach that is based on voluntary data sharing agreements and fragmented data management, conforming with the entrenched interests of autonomous sub-national actors and thus extending the path-dependence of forest governance to forest data governance. We conclude by proposing how the framework could be further developed and tested to help explain which factors condition the formation of natural resource data institutions and subsequently the (re-)distribution of benefits they govern. Transparent and efficient data approaches can be enabled only if the analysis of data institutions is given equal attention to the technological development of data solutions…(More)”.
Sustaining Open Data as a Digital Common — Design principles for Common Pool Resources applied to Open Data Ecosystems
Paper by Johan Linåker, and Per Runeson: “Digital commons is an emerging phenomenon and of increasing importance, as we enter a digital society. Open data is one example that makes up a pivotal input and foundation for many of today’s digital services and applications. Ensuring sustainable provisioning and maintenance of the data, therefore, becomes even more important.
We aim to investigate how such provisioning and maintenance can be collaboratively performed in the community surrounding a common. Specifically, we look at Open Data Ecosystems (ODEs), a type of community of actors, openly sharing and evolving data on a technological platform.
We use Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for Common Pool Resources as a lens to systematically analyze the governance of earlier reported cases of ODEs using a theory-oriented software engineering framework.
We find that, while natural commons must regulate consumption, digital commons such as open data maintained by an ODE must stimulate both use and data provisioning. Governance needs to enable such stimulus while also ensuring that the collective action can still be coordinated and managed within the frame of available maintenance resources of a community. Subtractability is, in this sense, a concern regarding the resources required to maintain the quality and value of the data, rather than the availability of data. Further, we derive empirically-based recommended practices for ODEs based on the design principles by Ostrom for how to design a governance structure in a way that enables a sustainable and collaborative provisioning and maintenance of the data.
ODEs are expected to play a role in data provisioning which democratize the digital society and enables innovation from smaller commercial actors. Our empirically based guidelines intend to support this development…(More).
Expert Group to Eurostat releases its report on the re-use of privately-held data for Official Statistics
Blog by Stefaan Verhulst: “…To inform its efforts, Eurostat set up an expert group in 2021 on ‘Facilitating the use of new data sources for official statistics’ to reflect on opportunities offered by the data revolution to enhance the reuse of private sector data for official statistics”.
Data reuse is a particularly important area for exploration, both because of the potential it offers and because it is not sufficiently covered by current policies. Data reuse occurs when data collected for one purpose is shared and reused for another, often with resulting social benefit. Currently, this process is limited by a fragmented or outdated policy and regulatory framework, and often quite legitimate concerns over ethical challenges represented by sharing (e.g., threats to individual privacy).
Nonetheless, despite such hurdles, a wide variety of evidence supports the idea that responsible data reuse can strengthen and supplement official statistics, and potentially lead to lasting and positive social impact.
Having reviewed and deliberated about these issues over several months, the expert group issued its report this week entitled “Empowering society by reusing privately held data for official statistics”. It seeks to develop recommendations and a framework for sustainable data reuse in the production of official statistics. It highlights regulatory gaps, fragmentation of practices, and a lack of clarity regarding businesses’ rights and obligations, and it draws attention to the ways in which current efforts to reuse data have often led to ad-hoc, one-off projects rather than systematic transformation.
The report considers a wide variety of evidence, including historical, policy, and academic research, as well as the theoretical literature… (More)”.
Read the Eurostat report at: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/content/read-final-report_en
Many researchers say they’ll share data — but don’t
Article by Clare Watson: “Most biomedical and health researchers who declare their willingness to share the data behind journal articles do not respond to access requests or hand over the data when asked, a study reports1.
Livia Puljak, who studies evidence-based medicine at the Catholic University of Croatia in Zagreb, and her colleagues analysed 3,556 biomedical and health science articles published in a month by 282 BMC journals. (BMC is part of Springer Nature, the publisher of Nature; Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher.)
The team identified 381 articles with links to data stored in online repositories and another 1,792 papers for which the authors indicated in statements that their data sets would be available on reasonable request. The remaining studies stated that their data were in the published manuscript and its supplements, or generated no data, so sharing did not apply.
But of the 1,792 manuscripts for which the authors stated they were willing to share their data, more than 90% of corresponding authors either declined or did not respond to requests for raw data (see ‘Data-sharing behaviour’). Only 14%, or 254, of the contacted authors responded to e-mail requests for data, and a mere 6.7%, or 120 authors, actually handed over the data in a usable format. The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology on 29 May.
Puljak was “flabbergasted” that so few researchers actually shared their data. “There is a gap between what people say and what people do,” she says. “Only when we ask for the data can we see their attitude towards data sharing.”
“It’s quite dismaying that [researchers] are not coming forward with the data,” says Rebecca Li, who is executive director of non-profit global data-sharing platform Vivli and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts…(More)”.
The Intersection of Data, Equity, and City Governments
Blog by Yuki Mitsuda: “The Open Data Policy Lab’s City Incubator program was established in September 2021 to help realize the Third Wave of Open Data at the subnational level by building data capacity among city intrapreneurs. In its first iteration, the program supported innovators from ten cities around the world to better use data to address the opportunities and challenges they face.
Reflecting on the six-month program, the work enabled participants to meet the needs of their cities and the people within them. They also revealed shared themes across cities — common challenges and issues that defined urban, data-driven work in the 21st century. This blog explores one of the emerging themes we saw from participants in the City Incubator program: the intersection of equity, data, and city governments…
Three of our city incubator participants designed their data innovations around the ways cities and citizens can use data to measure and improve equity.
- Jennifer Bodnarchuk, a Senior Data Scientist at the Innovation & Technology Department in the City of Winnipeg, for example, led the development of a Diversity Dashboard that quantified and visualized their municipal government’s workforce representation. The tool can be used to measure the level of diversity represented in city-wide employment to move towards equitable hiring in the public sector.
- Henry Xavier Hernandez, the Chief Information Officer at the Information Technology Department in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and his team leveraged the City Incubator to develop Citizen 360, a public market analysis platform that helps businesses, organizations, and individuals identify economic opportunities in the city. This tool can aid small business owners from all backgrounds who are navigating the journey of starting a new business.
- Andrea Calderon led Albuquerque’s Equity Index, which helps evaluate the reach of city service distribution with the goal of increasing municipal investment in pockets of the city where equitable city service provision has not yet been achieved. Albuquerque’s Equity Index work entailed assessing air quality in the city through the framework of cumulative impacts, which measures “exposures, public health, or environmental effects from the combined emissions in a geographic area” in pursuit of environmental justice…(More)”.
The Future of Open Data: Law, Technology and Media
Book edited by Pamela Robinson, and Teresa Scassa: “The Future of Open Data flows from a multi-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Grant project that set out to explore open government geospatial data from an interdisciplinary perspective. Researchers on the grant adopted a critical social science perspective grounded in the imperative that the research should be relevant to government and civil society partners in the field.
This book builds on the knowledge developed during the course of the grant and asks the question, “What is the future of open data?” The contributors’ insights into the future of open data combine observations from five years of research about the Canadian open data community with a critical perspective on what could and should happen as open data efforts evolve.
Each of the chapters in this book addresses different issues and each is grounded in distinct disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives. The opening chapter reflects on the origins of open data in Canada and how it has progressed to the present date, taking into account how the Indigenous data sovereignty movement intersects with open data. A series of chapters address some of the pitfalls and opportunities of open data and consider how the changing data context may impact sources of open data, limits on open data, and even liability for open data. Another group of chapters considers new landscapes for open data, including open data in the global South, the data priorities of local governments, and the emerging context for rural open data…(More)”.