Rec. 15: Policy harmonisation

[sjDCC]

Efforts should be made to align and consolidate FAIR data policy, reducing divergence, inconsistencies and contradictions.

• Concerted work is needed to update policies to incorporate and align with the FAIR principles to ensure that policy properly supports the FAIR data Action Plan.
  Stakeholders: Policymakers

• A funders’ forum at a European and global level should do concrete work to align policies, DMP requirements and principles governing recognition and rewards.
  Stakeholders: Funders.

• Information on practice in relation to exceptions should be captured and fed into a body of knowledge which can inform future policy guidance and practice.
  Stakeholders: Policymakers; Global coordination fora.

• Policies should be versioned, indexed and semantically annotated in a policy registry.
  Stakeholders: Policymakers; Data services; Global coordination fora.

[marcrr]

I would suggest including scientific publishers in the stakeholders of this recommendation.

[hollydawnmurray]

F1000 position: Agreed with @marcrr above. Engaging publishers in a shared dialogue early on will allow them time to adapt to support the harmonised policy, should they wish to. Neglecting publishers from this conversation runs the risk that they will need to play catch up, or worse, be unable to support the policy. We continue to see a similar situation among some publishers with gold OA policies today.

[holubp]

BBMRI-ERIC Position: Policies need to be carefully aligned with the legal requirement, namely requirements on data protection.

[katerbow]

DFG position: In principle, the DFG supports the recommendation on harmonising data policies on an international level. It needs to be stressed, though, that such harmonization must not be an objective in itself, yet must be regarded as prerequisite for fostering international and cross-disciplinary research. Thus, it has to be ensured that harmonising efforts are not affecting or restricting the scientific work procedures. Scientific communities should approve any amendments planned to existing policies.

[ScienceEurope]

Science Europe is currently working on the alignment of funders’ policies (core requirements for DMPs and criteria for Trusted Repositories). These policies take all aspects of FAIR data into account and even go beyond those. These policies will be finalised and published by the end of 2018.

[pkdoorn]

Thumbs up. See my remarks under Rec. #12 : Data Management via DMPs #12.

[mromanie]

ESO position
We support this recommendation to the extent in which it doesn't over-constrain the individual disciplines and projects.

[carrd]

Wellcome Trust position:
Agree with the recommendation for alignment where this makes sense, and also that publishers are key stakeholders here - as perhaps are institutions?

[npch]

SSI position:

We agree with the general intention of this recommendation to reduce divergence and contradictions, so as to improve adoption.

We urge that work in this area also includes feedback from a cross-disciplinary set of researchers who can ensure that policies are not streamlined in such a way as they become a burden or unimplementable in real life.

Organisations focusing on research software (such as the Software Sustainability Institute) should be part of the stakeholder group for effort in this area related to the harmonisation of data-specific policies with software policies, which will be required due to the intrinsic link between software and research data.

[fniccolucci]

Fully agree with the above.
For example, DMPs help research, they are not Yet Another Bureaucratic Obligation, perhaps harmonised. So research communities should be involved in this process.
As done for other recommendations, I maintain also here that harmonisation must not kill multilingualism.

[gtoneill]

Fully support harmonisation for implementing FAIR Data policies and the FAIR Data Action Plan. It is crucial that researchers are involved in the development of FAIR Data policies before harmonisation.