Preparando SOD19: richiesta pubblicazione dati in arrivo

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Alberto

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Mar 18, 2019, 9:19:33 AM3/18/19

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Ciao spaghettari,

in questo raduno vorrei capire come mettere le mani sui dati europei che mi interessano. Inizialmente avevo pensato di proporre un hackathon per fare una richiesta (simil)-FOIA all'UE, ma poi ho deciso di provare a fare il primo passo da solo (o meglio, con l'aiuto di The Good Lobby). Se tutto va bene, posso proporre un talk (visto che a SOD19 di hackathon ce ne sono già troppi) in cui racconto la mia esperienza.

Quelli di The Good Lobby mi hanno chiesto qualche informazione, e gli ho mandato la mail che vi incollo qui sotto, nel caso a qualcuno interessi. I dati sono quelli che avevo provato a chiedere a Wendy Carrara a Open Data Fest, sempre gli stessi!

Which data I would like to see open?

The EU's Publication Office publishes datasets containing information on all research projects funded by the European Union under the subsequent framework programmes for research and innovation, currently Horizon 2020. These are extracted from the CORDIS information system, used by the Commission to administer the programme: receive applications, validate the eligibility of applicants and so on.

I would like the Commission to complete those datasets with information on the non-funded proposals.

What benefit would access to that information bring?

Here I would make three arguments. The first argument is one of market-making. One of the goals of EU-funded research is to foster collaboration ties between universities and the private sector (with a particular attention to SMEs). Knowing the full history of submissions would help newcomers into the framework programme to choose its partners wisely. If I am an SME looking to participate in a research programme, I would prefer to partner up with university A, who produces relatively few proposals but curates them well, and so has a high success rate. University B produces very many proposals; while it might have the same number of successes as University A, its success rate is lower. Since I am only going to present the one proposal, which is useful for my business, I would like to know the success rates of potential partners. This is not possible without access to the data of unsuccessful proposals.

The second argument is one of research. Having this information would allow the research community to study how its probability of success depends on several variables. Again, to know this it is necessary to have information on the non-funded proposals.

The third argument is one of general transparency. These data, like all administrative data, should be available by default. It is the Commission who should argue for them not to be released.

So why are these data not public?

I asked (informally) the Publication Office, and they came up with a IPR argument. Unsuccessful proposals are the intellectual property of the applicants. This, however, could be easily solved by stripping away all own content from the data. Even for successful proposals, the CORDIS dataset only publishes the abstracts.

What do I need help with?

The EU has multiple channels to ask for information. This is quite confusing. For these data, I find:

A "make a suggestion" button on the European Data Portal (https://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/suggestDataSet).
A request via email to the CORDIS help Desk (https://cordis.europa.eu/guidance/data_en.html)
A FOIA-like request channel, https://www.asktheeu.org.
I would like advice on which one(s) to use, and how to argue my case.

Alberto

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Mar 21, 2019, 11:28:10 AM3/21/19

to Spaghetti Open Data

Ok, nessuno mi si è filato, il che non lascia ben sperare :-)

Comunque la richiesta è ora su asktheEU.org. È stata fatta in modo "tattico": un solo anno, per evitare obiezioni di non proporzionalità. Me la sostenete? Twitter, Facebook, sostegno su asktheEU stessa.