Solving legal puzzles is not easy – supporting creating Data Management Plans in three scientific disciplines: chemistry, economics, and civil engineering

Abstract

See RECORDING (starts at 00:20:17).

Open Science Competence Center at the Gdańsk University of Technology Library was established upon the Bridge of Data project at the end of 2018. Our main goals include providing support for the academic community for broad issues associated with Open Science, especially with Open Research Data. Our team of professionals help researchers in many topics such as: "what kinds of data you need to share", "how to make your data openly available to others", or "how to create a Data Management Plan" – that recently has been the most popular and demanding service. 

One of the main challenges to support academic staff with Data Management Plans is dealing with the legal impediments to provide open access and reusing of research data for publicly funded scientific projects. The lack of understanding the legal issues in opening research is a significant barrier to facilitate Open Science. Much public-funded research requires to prepare a Data Management Plan that, among other items, provides information about ownership and user rights.

One of the most common activity for scholars is choosing which license (if any) they are supposed to use in terms of the dissemination the scientific output. However, in many cases, resolving the right license for research data is not enough. Academic staff faces many tensions with a lack of clarity around legal requirements and obstacles. The increasing researchers' need for understanding and describing conflicting issues (e.g. patenting) results in looking for professional and knowledgeable support at the university.

We examine the most frequent legal issues arising among DMPs from the three scientific disciplines: chemistry (e.g. ethical papers), economics (e.g. data value cycle), and civil engineering (e.g. complexity of construction data). In our presentation, we would like to introduce the main identified problems and show how mapping and benchmarking occurring problems among those disciplines help us to establish more efficient legal support for researchers.