The Agency’s commitment to openness is one of our key values, so I was eager to read The Royal Society’s new report, Science as an open enterprise. The report highlights the need to grapple with the huge deluge of data created by modern technologies in order to preserve the principle of openness.
An open culture enables trust. While technological advances make storing, manipulating and sharing data easier, making data available for scrutiny requires effort. We’ll need to make changes to the way we handle and store data, so that it’s usable and accessible. Otherwise, transparency is not achieving its aim of openness.
The limits to openness are fuzzy and complex, and there are legitimate boundaries that must be maintained to protect commercial value, privacy, safety and security. The report points out that we’ll need to move towards an intelligent openness, confronting problems as they arise.
At the Food Standards Agency, we already publish findings of our research on our open access repository Foodbase, and we’ve developed key principles for the publication of underpinning data. I fully support the Royal Society’s recommendations for free and open access of scientific data. At the Agency we’ll continue to develop policy on issues around the practicality of making data freely accessible.