PaNOSC data policy framework

The increasingly high profile of issues surrounding preservation and access of research data makes it important to work towards harmonisation of data polices across the research base.

Harmonization of PaN specific data policies and management of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and ethical issues is one of the main objectives of the PaNOSC project. In particular, considering that FAIR data principles more clearly define the concepts of Open Data, current policies should be updated to better align with current understanding of FAIR principles, while respecting the specific needs of the PaN community.

The work towards this achievement began by taking the Common Policy Framework of Scientific Data management at photon and neutron facilities developed in the frame of the FP7 PaNdata project, as a starting point for the further fine tuning of a common Open Data data policy.

In the process, some steps have been taken towards:

• The definition and adoption of common open standards for interoperability;
• Stewardship of data handled by the involved research infrastructures according to the FAIR principles;
• The production of guidelines for best practices based on experience of those PaN partners who already have Open Data policies since a few years now to help partners adopting Open Data data policies correctly from the start.

The work towards the fine-tuning of a common data policy for PaN facilities has been carried out in the frame of PaNOSC WP2 – Data Policy and Stewardship, which aims to enable facilities to ensure their data policies honour FAIR principles in the way they curate data.

As a first step towards this goal, partners collected and compared the lessons learned from their own policies and those of the other members of the PaN community who have experience putting data policies in place. Consultation with expert organisations, such as Force11 and OpenAIRE have been key to understand the latest research and best practices in applying FAIR principles to data.

Based on the abovementioned PaNData policy, a new PaN data policy framework, to which single facilities’ specific data policies should adhere to, has been published, in line with the EOSC activities on data policy harmonization. The developed policy ensures that FAIR principles are applied as broadly as possible. To facilitate the process, guidelines for DOIs, long term archiving, and legal aspects linked to FAIR data, GDPR and data federation will be published. A Data Management Plan template for experiments performed at the PaNOSC research infrastructures has also been defined and developed.

Finally, to validate data policy implementation, a follow up with multi facility partners, such as CERIC-ERIC and ELI, will take place to track and document the progress on adopting or adapting their existing policies to the PaNOSC data policy framework.