The ACTION team has been hard at work over the last several months with the development of a data sharing agreement, between the ACTION consortium partners, as well as between the ACTION project and our open call pilots. Data sharing agreements are complex legal documents that allow the legal and secure exchange of data between institutions. They are a requirement wherever data cannot be made openly accessible, but needs to be shared between multiple stakeholders.
This work has been led by Gefion Thuermer, who has previously worked on the Data Pitch project – an open innovation programme bringing together organisations that have data and start-ups who work with data to develop products and services. In this context, Gefion has developed a Data Sharing Toolkit, collating all the learning of the project, and helping organisations that want to generate value by sharing data or facilitating data sharing. This toolkit was the subject of a lunchtime lecture at the Open Data Institute. While in itself focused on innovation, data sharing is also relevant in many contexts of citizen science, such as when citizen science projects want to exchange data with external stakeholders.
Gefion is now applying what she learned in Data Pitch to her work on the ACTION Toolkit.