Provide infrastructure for sharing, especially for sensitive data

[jrineakter]

Why would I put my sensitive data in jeopardy? The term “open data” sounds like a wonderful idea and for most data it is, but there is the issue of competitive and Personally identifiable information (PII). Just because data is sensitive does not mean it is not “shareable,” for example with individuals that have signed an agreement or gone through an Institutional Review Board (IRB) training (a requirement for a lot of researchers). It’s easier to set limits with a proper license and infrastructure. At the moment, there are several academic institutions working on how to set up a proper repository to accommodate data of varying sizes and different access levels. Yet while the institutions are in limbo or completely lacking such an infrastructure, their researchers are left to publish their data (often only metadata) in disparate places. The data is in danger of being lost or forgotten.

As data.world continues to share more data, we are finding increasing examples of amazing data that can’t be shared because of licensing. Or the data is available for download and seems hong kong whatsapp number data to have an open license, but data users must agree to terms which makes sharing/utilizing the data beyond the original repository difficult. Of course, there is also the case of orphaned data that no longer has a custodian to assign a license and is left unusable. Because academia is so transient, the requirements for how data can be used are sometimes lost.

The shift towards sustainable open data policies is slow but evident. We look forward to seeing more institutions improving the mechanisms to make their data open and also look forward to helping with our own platform and tools. Please visit the Licensing topic in data.world’s Forum where you can discuss your personal experiences and challenges with making your data open.

I’d like to thank all the participants that attended the session. Anonymized notes from the unconference are here for anyone to peruse: Absence of Open Data Licensing in Open Data Efforts. I’d also like to thank the folks at SPARC that ran one of the most organized and inspiring conferences I’ve ever attended.

If you’d like to check out licenses we love, see this blog on licensing we recommend for data.

Licensing for open data is challenging enough, so how do companies scale data distrbution to their partners for business use? Learn how they use data.world to get data and insights where they need to be here.