One development in the last decade has been a widening acceptance of the need for an integrated data policy. This has taken place at both national and international level and there are a number of new and developing data policies.
Enhanced networking, more and more complex databases and improved technological developments, as well as economic considerations have made it imperative that issues of data creation, access and management are addressed on a much wider geographical level.
Within the social sciences, the call for such policies is driven by the growth in cross-national, collaborative and interdisciplinary research, by the accession of new EU members with relatively unsophisticated research governance, and by a desire to capture and spread good practice in member states.
The main elements of such policies have been described as the Operating Principles for Data Access Regimes by the team working on the OECD International Framework to Promote Access to Data. They have identified the following:
- Openness
- Transparency and active data dissemination
- Assignment and assumption of formal responsibilities
- Technical and semantic interoperability of databases
- Quality control, data validation, authentication, and authorization
- Operational efficiency and flexibility
- Respect for intellectual property and other ethical and legal requirements
- Management accountability, including funding approaches
The principles underlying many of the new and emerging data policies is that data resulting from publicly funded research should remain publicly available, subject only to a number of overriding concerns:
- Protection of confidentiality and privacy,
- Acceptable first use by principal investigators and respect for intellectual property rights, and
- National security
