#publication Data procurement eats up time: open by default, please

This text by Dr Vera Eichenauer first appeared in the column «Das letzte Wort» in the bulletin of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences.

The people I talk to, both international and Swiss, are often surprised when I tell them that Switzerland lags well behind the world’s leaders when it comes to the openness of its government data (Open Government Data, OGD): in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Global Open Data Index, Switzerland ranks only 47th, in the Open Data Inventory (from 2018) 33rd, and in the Open Data Barometer at least 22nd – although in the last-named index with only half the points of Great Britain and behind France, Germany and the Czech Republic. And this concerns the openness of data that public administrations at federal, cantonal and communal level already collect, paid for with taxpayers’ money.

As a citizen, I am outraged by the arduous access to public data and its poor documentation. Data are an important basis for forming opinions and the starting point for decisions – by governments as well as by citizens. This is becoming evident precisely during the current Covid-19 crisis. The Open Government Data strategy, which is in itself binding and part of the 2019–23 legislative planning, must now be implemented swiftly.
As a researcher, the missing or unsystematic information about existing data is above all a huge waste of time: I need a lot of time to find out which data even exist, and even more time to apply for them and check them for quality, suitability and combinability.

A change of mindset is needed

Central and public documentation of datasets that are already available, together with their properties, access conditions and processes, could enormously reduce the time researchers have to spend. This promotes equal access to data for younger or less well-connected early-career researchers and for researchers from abroad. Easy access to data also promotes the reproducibility of research results.

Nobody should be pilloried: digitalisation is being pursued diligently everywhere. What matters is the change of mindset towards the primacy of openness and transparency (open by default). Publishing new administrative and research data as open data involves minimal effort – unlike preparing old datasets. Thanks to such openness, social scientists and humanities scholars, as well as non-academic analysts and users of data, have more time for their core work: investigating new questions and generating insights.

If publications (hopefully soon open access) are the academic currency and innovations are Switzerland’s gold, then high-quality data from a country as institutionally, culturally and geographically diverse as Switzerland are a virtually inexhaustible raw material that must be tapped, not least for our researchers. For this I wish for «full steam ahead», so that I can spend more time analysing data instead of collecting and preparing them.