The Denton Declaration
An Open Data Manifesto
Introduction
On May 22, 2012 at the University of North Texas, a group of technologists and librarians, scholars and researchers, university administrators, and other stakeholders gathered to discuss and articulate best practices and emerging trends in research data management. This declaration bridges the converging interests of these stakeholders and promotes collaboration, transparency, and accountability across organizational and disciplinary boundaries.
Declarations
Open access to research data is critical for advancing science, scholarship, and society.
Research data, when repurposed, has an accretive value.
Publicly funded research should be publicly available for public good.
Transparency in research is essential to sustain the public trust.
The validation of research data by the peer community is an essential function of the responsible conduct of research.
Managing research data is the responsibility of a broad community of stakeholders including researchers, funders, institutions, libraries, archivists, and the public.
Principles
- Open access to research data benefits society, and facilitates decision making for public policy.
- Publicly available research data helps promote a more cost-effective and efficient research environment by reducing redundancy of efforts.
- Access to research data ensures transparency in the deployment of public funds for research and helps safeguard public good will toward research.
- Open access to research data facilitates validation of research results, allows data to be improved by identifying errors, and enables the reuse and analysis of legacy data using new techniques developed through advances and changing perceptions.
- Funding entities should support reliable long-term access to research data as a component of research grants due to the benefits that accrue from the availability of research data.
- Data preservation should involve sufficient identifying characteristics and descriptive information so that others besides the data producer can use and analyze the data.
- Data should be made available in a timely manner; neither too soon to ensure that researchers to benefit from their labor, nor too late to allow for verification of the results.
- A reasonable plan for the disposition of research data should be established as part of data management planning, rather than arbitrarily claiming the need for preservation in perpetuity.
- Open access to research data should be a central goal of the lifecycle approach to data management, with consideration given at each stage of the data lifecycle to what metadata, data architecture, and infrastructure will be necessary to support data discoverability, accessibility, and long-term stewardship.
- The costs of cyberinfrastructure should be distributed among the stakeholders – including researchers, agencies, and institutions – in a way that supports a long-term strategy for research data acquisition, collection, preservation, and access.
- The academy should adapt existing frameworks for tenure and promotion, and merit-based incentives to account for alternative forms of publication and research output including data papers, public data sets, and digital products. Value inheres in data as a standalone research output.
- The principles of open access should not be in conflict with the intellectual property rights of researchers, and a culture of citation and acknowledgement should be cultivated rigorously and conscientiously among all practitioners.
- Open access should not compromise the confidentiality of research subjects, and will comply with principles of data security defined by HIPAA, FERPA, and other privacy guidelines.
Intentions
In our professional interactions at meetings, on review panels, conferences, teaching, etc. we will advocate the following positions:
- A culture of openness in research.
- A federated model of archiving data to enable discoverability, transparency, and open access.
- A robust and sustainable funding regime for research data management infrastructure (technical, policy, and human resources).
- The development and adoption of metadata standards for research data.
- Long-term access to data that supports published research outputs.
- Support for researchers in negotiations with publishers to allow open access to research in repositories.
- Recognition of researchers’ intellectual property in data and scholarly research outputs.
Invitation
We invite all others who support these principles of research data management to join with us to make our vision of a culture of open data a reality.
Join us! Add your support to the principles of open data by adding your signature. Organizations wishing to lend their support, please email.
Participants
Jonathan Crabtree, Assistant Director for Archives and Information Technology, H.W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Stephen Griffin, Professor in Cyberscholarship, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh
Michael Greenlee, Reference, Instruction, and Web Services Librarian, University of Tulsa
José-Marie Griffiths, Vice President for Academic Affairs, Bryant University; National Science Board
Martin Halbert, Dean of Libraries, University of North Texas
Michael Hulsey, Technical Applications Specialist, Immunocytometry Systems Group, BD Biosciences
James H. Kennedy, Regents Professor and Director, Elm Fork Education Center and Natural Heritage Museum, Department of Biological Sciences, University of North Texas
Spencer D. C. Keralis, Director for Digital Scholarship, University of North Texas
John Kunze, Associate Director, University of California Curation Center
William E. Moen, Associate Dean for Research, College of Information, University of North Texas
Allen Renear, Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Kenneth W. Sewell, Associate Vice President for Research, University of North Texas
Brian E. C. Schottlaender, The Audrey Geisel University Librarian, University of California – San Diego
Denise Perry-Simmons, Assistant Vice President, Research Development, University of North Texas
Shannon Stark, Strategic Projects Librarian, University of North Texas
Carly Strasser, Project Manager, Data Curation for Excel, California Digital Library
Rene Tanner, Life Sciences Librarian, Arizona State University
Co-Signers
(view on world map)
Sian Brannon, Assistant Dean for Collection Management, University of North Texas Libraries
Bryan Sinclair, Associate Dean, Public Services, University Library, Georgia State University
Daniel Gelaw Alemneh, Digital Curator, University of North Texas Libraries
Karen Goss, Graduation Coordinator, Toulouse Graduate School, University of North Texas
Dr. Nirmala Gunapala, Science Librarian and Assistant Professor, Library, New Mexico State University
Dr. Jeff M. Allen, Professor, Department of Learning Technologies, Center for Knowledge Solutions, University of North Texas
Sheila Corrall, Professor and Chair, Library & Information Sciences Program, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh
Ronald L. Larsen, Dean and Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh
Jill Kleister, Graduate Reader, Toulouse Graduate School, University of North Texas
Jordon Andrade, E-Science Librarian, Dirac Science Library, The Florida State University
Melissa G. Gonzales, Archivist for University, Labor and Political Collections, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington
Michael Shanahan, Professor, Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Peter Rogers, Information Literacy and Social Sciences Librarian, Colgate University Libraries, Colgate University
David Shotton, Emeritus Reader, Research Data Management and Semantic Publishing, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
Mercè Crosas, Director of Product Development, Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), Harvard University
Matthew Woollard, Director, UK Data Archive, University of Essex
Erik Hetzner, Developer, UC3, California Digital Library
Laurent Romary, Directeur de Recherche, Inria
Peter Murray-Rust, Reader Emeritus, Unilver Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics, University of Cambridge
Jakes Rawlinson, Chief Medical Officer/Lecturer, Public Health Medicine, University of Limpopo
Janez Štebe, Head, ADP, University of Ljubljana
Pat Loria, Research Librarian, Library Services, University of Southern Queensland
Tyler Curtain, Associate Professor, English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Leonie Hayes, Research Support Services Manager, Library, The University of Auckland
Mark Hahnel, Former Researcher, NHLI, Imperial College London
Mike Taylor, Research Associate, Earth Sciences, University of Bristol
Ernesto Priego, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, University College London
Ethan White, Associate Professor, Biology, Utah State University
Mark Anderson, Teacher, ELA Special Education 5-9, Jonas Bronck Academy
Ignasi Bartomeus, Postdoc, Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Lourdes Pérez González, Librarian, Biblioteca Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela - Galiza
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor, Physics, Indiana University
Laurie Goodman, Editor-in-Chief, Publishing, GigaScience
Clarisse Pais, Librarian Coordinator, Servicos de Documentacao e Bibliotecas do IPB, Instituto Politécnico de Bragança
Aldo Velazquez, Associate Professor, IT Teaching Programme, Instituto Normal de Educación Técnica - Uruguay
Ben Morris, Graduate Student, Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Katherine Skinner, Executive Director, Educopia Institute
Karim B. Boughida, Associate University Librarian, George Washington Libraries, George Washington University
Carol Hixson, Dean of Library, Nelson Poynter Memorial Library, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg
Irina Radchenko, Associate Professor, Research and Educational Center of Semantic Technology, Higher School of Economics
Sridhar Gutam, Crop Production, Central Institute for Subtropical Horticulture
Maristella Feustle, Musical Special Collections Library, Music Library, University of North Texas
Laura Waugh, Repository Librarian for Scholarly Works, Library, University of North Texas
Richard W Clement, Dean of Libraries, Utah State University
Joy Nelson, Director of Migrations, ByWater Solutions
Plato L. Smith II, Technical & Paraprofessional, Florida A&M University
The Denton Declaration: An Open Data Manifesto by Spencer D. C. Keralis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
