Who owns data?

This should be of concern to all academic research scientists who think they have the right to publish on their own timeline.

An excerpt of an article from Times Higher Education by Hannah Fearn:

When Michael Baillie began analysing the rings in Irish oak trees more than 30 years ago, the long reach of the Freedom of Information Act in Britain was years away.

But three decades on, the FoI laws have been used by a science blogger, Douglas Keenan, to obtain data collected by the emeritus professor of palaeoecology at Queen's University Belfast over the course of a career investigating catastrophic environmental events.

After a three-year battle to get the university to release the data, some of which are yet to be published by the academic himself, Dr Keenan won a ruling from the Information Commissioner in April that said that Queen's owned the data and must release it.

The precedent has important implications for academics, raising issues similar to those highlighted in last week's report by Sir Muir Russell into the so-called Climategate affair at the University of East Anglia.

Until now, researchers have published data at the time of their choosing, through the normal academic channels and in the context of the overall objectives of their work.

The decision in the Queen's case indicates that any interested party can use FoI laws to request any data belonging to a UK university, whether they form part of an academic's published work or whether they are still raw.