Publication of scientific data from EU-coordinated monitoring programmes and surveys

Open government data are about wide and free availability of public information created or collected by public entities. The International Open Data Charter and Findable, Accessible, Interoperable And Reusable Data (FAIR) data principles were selected as the guiding principles for the development of this report. A review of open data maturity reports indicated that most of the EU28+ are making significant progress in open government data, however there are different levels of adoption in food and feed safety organisations. EFSA’s Scientific Data Warehouse (SDWH) access rules were defined in 2015 (EFSA, 2015a); this report extends them to an open-by-default approach. Precautions are specified to ensure people, products or food businesses are not identified, and that information deemed confidential is protected. A proactive scientific data publication process that is open, timely, comprehensive, comparable, interoperable, accessible and usable is defined. Publication can be performed on behalf of data providers by EFSA (Supported publications) or by organisations according to their own open data policy (self-publishers). Structural metadata to support interoperability and comply with data protection requirements is defined as are the minimum descriptive and administrative metadata to support accessibility and usability. Datasets will be published in the open evidence community Knowledge Junction and assigned a Digital Object Identifier to ensure persistence and allow tracking of reuse. API technology and Data Catalogue Vocabulary Application Profile (DCAT-AP) will be used to ensure integration with the EU open data ecosystem. Attribution and citation to give credit to parties that have contributed to the creation of datasets are emphasised. The working group identified many benefits of open data and proposes mechanisms to overcome perceived barriers. Upon endorsement, EFSA should proceed with the scheduling of the publication of data from the SDWH. New data collections with a requirement to store data in the SDWH would be subject to this open data approach.