01 November 2023

Open Access to Research Data

The Data Access Committee of the Faculty of Medicine (MF-DAC) supports research groups in publishing and obtaining sensitive research data

Why open access to research data?

Open access to research data improves integrity and transparency in research and enables wider use of research data. Public funding bodies for research projects, such as the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), have for some time required that the publications of funded research projects be freely accessible. In turn, more and more of the medical journals used for the publications require that the research data underlying the publications also be made available in public data archives suitable for this purpose. This can be a difficult task for researchers to accomplish when dealing with sensitive research data that may not be published in its entirety for free access.

Requirement for publication of research data: the FAIR guiding principles.

Research data are subject to certain requirements and must be specially prepared. Open access to research data should follow the FAIR Guiding Principles for the Management of Scientific Data. FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable. This means that data should not only be easy to find and understand, but also accessible under clearly defined and comprehensible conditions.

Open access is not synonymous with publishing the entire dataset

Research data and associated metadata with unique identifiers should be stored in an openly accessible, non-commercial data repository. Legal requirements and regulations must be observed. Especially for sensitive data, the following applies: access must be as open as possible, but as secure as necessary. In particular, the legal and ethical rights of data donors (e.g. patients) must be respected. Thus, open access does not mean that all data of a study are publicly stored and anyone can access them. The preparation and publication of data and metadata is complex and requires expertise from various disciplines. Supporting researchers in this process is one of the tasks of the newly founded MF-DAC.

The mission of the MF-DAC

When sensitive research data are to be published, the MF-DAC can be commissioned by the researchers of the Faculty of Medicine as a Data Access Committee. ("Data Submission Process"). Third parties, for example researchers from other institutions, who wish to access these sensitive research data for their own research, can then contact the MF-DAC with their request ("Data Access Request"):

Reminder for researchers

For researchers, this means that they must not only publish and disseminate "their own" data, but that data from other studies can also be used for their own analyses. Until now, such reuse of research data was mostly possible only for their own studies or in the context of collaborations. This opens up opportunities for researchers to conduct their own analyses on further questions using existing data sets from external institutions.