Open research data in Poland on the rise
The importance of research data management and sharing has been highlighted in the past few years among research communities in Poland. One of the main factors was the development and introduction of the National Science Centre's open science policy.
The National Science Centre has implemented open-access solutions with respect to research data and publications. In 2019, the agency included a Data Management Plan (DMP) in its application forms. In 2020, it adopted Open Access policy that covers scientific publications with underlying data:
Where possible, underlying data (basic data sets) related to the published articles should be placed in an open repository, based on a Creative Commons Public Domain licence (CC0 licence), data citation standards laid down in the Declaration of Data Citation Principles by FORCE 11, as well as the principles specified in TOP Guidelines. All published metadata must meet the guidelines laid down by OpenAIRE (https://zenodo.org/record/6918#.XqfeHf0zbIU) and include a note about project funding resources (National Science Centre, project number).
National Science Centre, Open Science: https://www.ncn.gov.pl/en/finansowanie-nauki/otwarta-nauka
As a service provider, we are currently observing the beneficial outcomes of those undertakings. In 2020, the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling at the University of Warsaw (ICM) launched three data repositories open for researchers from various research fields, one of them being the Repository for Open Data RepOD, a general-purpose repository (https://repod.icm.edu.pl/).
The previous version of the service was launched in 2015, while research data management was still a novelty among the Polish academic community. However, only in the last two years has the Repository for Open Data started to be widely used among researchers and scientific institutions.
In March 2023, we observed the biggest leap in the number of datasets deposited in the repository. Up to this time, the average number of datasets deposited monthly was about 15, while in March, it reached 100. Around 80% of those datasets were linked to the National Science Centre programmes via relevant metadata regarding the funding source.
The total number of datasets in the repository has recently exceeded 500.
The Repository for Open Data provides metadata in a standard, structured format, allowing researchers to share their datasets in line with FAIR principles. It's also possible to provide a link to related publications and/or datasets, select one of the Creative Commons licences, and attribute it to an individual file. All datasets, of course, receive a Digital Object Identifier, a globally unique, persistent identifier. The service is available not only for individual researchers but also for scholarly institutions interested in setting up a collection. Currently, there are almost 20 collections run by various research-performing organizations, such as universities, academies, and research institutes.
The development of open research data repositories in Poland
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