Sandra Pérez Roig
Universities and research centres promote free and universal access to data
The UOC, as part of its mission to foster open science and knowledge, has begun to publish its research findings in the repository operated in consortium with the other universities and CERCA research centres, a digital space operated by the CSUC (Catalan University Service Consortium).This cooperative research data repository allows participating universities and research centres to share experiences, resources and good practices and to tackle the challenges of managing large amounts of data, different formats and great numbers of files.
UOC researchers have analysed data from Airbnb, the property market and other demographic and socio-economic variables to establish their impact upon housing in the city of Barcelona. This is the first UOC data set to be published on the new DataverseCAT repository. Open data "are of special value to readers, to complement the reading of papers, and can help to develop future research work", explained researcher Lluís Garay, from the Faculty of Economics and Business and New Perspectives on Tourism and Leisure (NOUTUR) research group.
Opening up access to academic publications is one way of guaranteeing that research reaches everyone under the same conditions and also increases the visibility of the work carried out by the research team, conserving data for subsequent research and avoiding the unnecessary duplication of work. "The open access publication of data is not only a European imperative, but also key stance taken by the academic world to help resolve the complex challenges facing our current societies. The UOC works to create and share knowledge as a tool for social transformation, in which research and innovation play a much broader role in tackling global challenges such as those of the United Nations' 2030 Agenda," said Pastora Martínez Samper, Vice President for Globalization and Cooperation
With the goal of making the UOC an open knowledge hub, the university has, since 2018, been developing its Open Knowledge Action Plan to make it a more transparent and participative organization and to contribute to transforming research findings into actions and outcomes that benefit society. The Plan also includes awareness-raising and guidance actions for teaching and research staff on open access and open science. One of the key goals of the Open Knowledge Action Plan is to ensure that all the data generated as part of the academic research process follow the FAIR principles, with the sights set on 2030 as the year that this is achieved.
Why an open data repository?
To foster open science, since 2017, all European projects funded through the Horizon 2020 programme must guarantee that their data follow the FAIR principles. The aim is also to encourage making knowledge easily accessible and reusable, thereby reducing the associated efforts and costs and, at the same time, improving the integrity of the research performed. This is why a range of initiatives to guarantee the use of FAIR data are being carried out on an international level. Good examples of this are provided by the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), a European cloud-based infrastructure designed to share FAIR research data, and the DataverseNO repository, used mainly by research staff affiliated with Norwegian research centres.
What is the new repository like?
The repository uses an application based on open-source code, initially developed by Harvard University's Institute of Quantitative Social Sciences (IQSS). It has a multilingual interface and allows every data set to have one single DOI identifier and a global, permanent URL. It also incorporates standardized citation models. It can cope with extremely large files, and all records are available in a wide range of formats.
Publishing data in this new repository will help research staff improve the visibility of research, establish new contacts between professionals in their fields of study and fulfil the mandate of funding bodies, whilst also contributing to opening up knowledge and spawning new research.