Over 80 per cent of data relating to China's research into pure science — such as theoretical mathematics, physics and chemistry — will be freely available on the Internet, according to the country's top science official.
Xu Guanhua, China's minister of Science and Technology, revealed the country's data-sharing plan yesterday (23 October) at the international conference for the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), an event focused on promoting data sharing worldwide.
In order to achieve its goal, China will establish 40 scientific data centres by 2010, covering 300 databases relating to the environment, agriculture, human health, pure science, engineering and regional scientific and technology information. All of them will be openly accessed through a public portal initiated by the Ministry of Science and Technology.
According to Xu, most of these centres are already being constructed.
Meanwhile, 32 national standards — specifications for data processing and storage — are being worked out to support the data-sharing through these data centres. Xu revealed that 23 of them have already been completed....
However, there have been widespread complaints from scientists in China that data is not being adequately shared among the Chinese scientific community, which Xu said has undermined the country's goals for innovation.
"Part of the reasons [for this] is that the institutions owning these data hope to monopolise them so that they can produce more scientific results of their own," Qu Guosheng, a senior scientist from the National Earthquake Response Support Service, told SciDev.Net.
In his speech, Xu said that the science ministries and departments are aware of the problem. They are currently revising and designing laws and policies to make data sharing compulsory for publicly-funded research....
Comment. I believe that China is the first nation to mandate OA to data arising from publicly-funded research. Although 34 nations (including China, the UK, and the US) signed OECD's Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding on January 30, 2004, China is the first to implement it. Kudos to all involved. The next step for China: mandate OA to peer-reviewed research articles arising from publicly-funded research. The next step for the rest of the world: follow China's lead on data sharing.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/25/2006 10:23:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
