Washington, DC - Leading American and European policy makers said greater international collaboration is needed so scientists can share more research data to solve climate, healthcare, economic and other challenges facing the globe.
“An international problem requires an international solution,” said Rep. Dan Lipinski, the ranking Democrat on the US House Subcommittee on Research. Speaking at a conference in July on US-EU trade policy, Lipinski said, “All trends point to greater access to scientific data” to advance global research faster. “These are big issues that are best dealt with together.”
“Within the transatlantic partnership it seems to me this will be an opportunity for scientific collaboration,” agreed Malcolm Harbour, a British Member of the European Parliament who is chairman of the Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Affairs. While ensuring safeguards for data privacy, he said, “We should encourage the expert groups we set up, and the interoperability tools for the Internet, and get on with it.”
The legislators were speaking at a panel discussion in Washington about international collaboration in scientific data - and the work of a new international organisation, the Research Data Alliance. The RDA was launched in 2012 by the US, EU and Australian governments as a coordinating body to identify and remove technical barriers to effective sharing of scientific data across the globe and across scientific disciplines. The RDA has opened membership to a wide range of technical experts in industry, academia and policy, and now has more than 750 members from over 50 countries.
Counting the benefits
Economic stimulus is among the potential benefits. “We are on the cusp of a tremendous wave of innovation, productivity and growth - all driven by big data,” said Francine Berman, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a member of the governing RDA Council, speaking at the conference, which was organised by the Transatlantic Policy Network and Science|Business. As an example, she cited a recent study finding that, “Strategic use of this data infrastructure can create $300 billion (in economic output) in the healthcare sector annually in the US. Data is needed for both big ideas, and business.”
A range of scientific and social problems could be tackled more efficiently if researchers could find and use each others’ data. For instance, Berman said, asthma currently affects 300 million people around the world - one in 12 in the US, incurring $56 billion in medical costs. It’s a complex disease affected by many factors - “a socio-cultural health problem.” To tackle it, she said, global health researchers would need access to many local databases of air quality, health services or patient profiles - but that’s not possible today. “Data infrastructure is needed to help us combine this data. We need interoperability frameworks. We need a common policy to help guide us when patient information is involved. This is a global issue,” Berman said.
Tracking and preventing wildfires is another area of potential data collaboration, said Ross Wilkinson, executive director of the Australian National Data Service and an RDA Council member. The cost of wildfires, especially in built-up areas, is high around the world; and, he said, it would be “nice to understand how we can live safely in an environment where fire is a threat.” But that would require shared knowledge of soil quality, water resources, population distribution and other factors, and “There is not a particular scientific discipline you can go to, to answer the question.” Enabling greater sharing of databases, across disciplines and borders, would help.
Other fields that would benefit from more data sharing include astronomy, linguistics, oceanography, climate research and more, the panellists said. “The impact of scientific data has gone viral; it covers all areas of investigation,” said John Wood, another RDA Council member and secretary-general of the Association of Commonwealth Universities. “We are talking about the free market of scientific data.”
Meeting the challenges
But global cooperation is needed to address several challenges. Most important, several said, is agreeing on ways to permit scientific sharing without compromising individual data privacy. “Politically,” said Harbour, “We do have to deal with the sensitivities of citizens on data and data management. When data is prepared for health purposes, we need to give confidence” that personal information is safe. Wood agreed, saying, “I think the big issue is about trust.”
Another challenge is data literacy, said Berman. “With the rising amount of data, it isn’t just bits; we need to understand those bits in context - to figure out what’s good and bad, what’s credible and not. Having a sophisticated citizenry that can understand what data means is tremendously important.”
But as Wilkinson noted, “We don’t have much idea yet how to develop a data-literate society. It’s likely the biggest cost of all” for governments to handle.
Another problem is convincing policy makers that this matters. This field could be, “The future biggest engine for growth,” said Edit Herczog, a Hungarian Member of the European Parliament. Its economic importance needs to be conveyed to lawmakers around the world. “You need to speak a language the policy makers speak: How many jobs, not just the plumbing and data.”
There are also many technical challenges. These include agreeing on international standards for identifiers, so data can be labelled uniquely; on global registries that point to the data; on intellectual property protection, data storage and much more.
Bringing communities together
As Laurence Lannom, Director of Information Services and Vice President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives told the meeting, “Strings of numbers without context are meaningless. You need to understand how the numbers are organised, what instrument was used. You have to have a way to put these together without confusing or misrepresenting - and in a way that the machines can understand.” This isn’t a novel problem, he pointed out, “The reason there is a global telephone system is not because there’s a global company, but because various telephone companies have figured out a way to talk together. In the Internet, there are lots of computer networks but they don’t talk to each other.” RDA is working to solve that problem.
“The world is interconnected,” Lannom said. “The more we learn, the more connected things appear. That adds difficulty because different scientific communities have different languages, different practices. What RDA needs to do is bring disparate communities together.”
For more information: www.rd-alliance.org
RDA Europe, the European plug-in to RDA, funded by the European Commission, is coordinated by a focused team of European organisations led by CSC-Tieteen Tietotekniikan Keskus Oy – FI and coordinated by Leif Laaksonen supported by Barcelona Supercomputing Center - ES, Consorzio Interuniversitario Cineca - IT, The University of Edinburgh - UK, Max Planck Gesellschaft Zur Foerderung Der Wissenschaften E.V. - DE, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - FR, Science And Technology Facilities Council - UK, Universiteit Maastricht - NL, Association of Commonwealth Universities - UK, Trust-It Services Ltd - UK, Athena Research And Innovation Center In Information Communication & Knowledge Technologies - GR, Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche - IT
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