Formulation of the "Keio University Academic Data Management and Utilization Policy"

2022/11/23

In July 2022, the Keio University Academic Data Management and Utilization Policy was formulated. This serves as a guideline for appropriately managing and preserving "academic data" produced and used in research at Keio University, and for making it available for utilization in a form as open to society as possible. It was created by the Special Committee on Research Data established by the Office for Research Coordination and Administration. Here, academic data refers to raw data from experiments and observations conducted in research, audio data from interviews, and government statistical data that was analyzed even if not collected by the researcher themselves.

To understand why such a policy regarding academic data has become necessary, it is essential to understand the major transformations currently occurring in academic research activities. That transformation is the movement toward "openness" based on the premise of digitalization. While digitalization is progressing throughout society, the field of academic research is an area where digitalization advanced earlier than in society at large. The automation of experimental and observational processes in research, and the digital processing of results and analysis, have spread across many fields, albeit with varying levels of adoption. Academic journal articles, which are the primary source of research results, are now distributed almost entirely in the form of electronic journals.

With this comprehensive digitalization of research activities as a premise, open access and open science have attracted significant interest in academic communication in recent years. Open access is a movement to distribute academic journal articles freely so they can be accessed at no cost. When electronic journals became widespread around 2000, the format of expensive bulk contracts (Big Deals) spread, leading to a situation where many university libraries could not subscribe to academic journals without gathering funds from book budgets or other research expenses. Depending on the university, the number of journals purchased decreased. Inherently, academic information has a public nature, and there is an ideal that researchers who need that information should have free access to it. Based on that ideal, various systems for free access to papers have been born.

Furthermore, recently, there has been a growing argument that not only should papers as research results be made open, but the research data that formed the basis of those papers should also be published and shared. This can be considered the starting point for exploring new ways of research called open science. There are still various discussions and no fixed definition of what open science is, but its essence is the ideal that the entire research process is digitalized and research proceeds while sharing all information. In other words, it is an image where everything from the research idea and planning stage to observation, experimentation, implementation of surveys, processing/analysis/interpretation of that data, and the summary and publication of results in various forms is done via the internet and the cloud. Of course, this is not currently realized, but the first step is the movement to implement the storage, publication, and sharing of "data" closely linked to the research process—knowledge that until now has only been shared mutually in the form of results such as conference presentations, journal articles, and books.

The importance of research data has been recognized for a long time. Databases that allow the registration, publication, and use of genetic sequence data based on international cooperation—DDBJ in Japan, GenBank in the US, and EMBL in Europe—began in the 1980s and are famous as successful examples of research data sharing. Regarding COVID-19, which has fundamentally changed current social life, many paid papers have been made available for free, and international sharing of research data is also taking place. In the "Coronavirus Control Taskforce," which Takanori Kanai, Dean of the School of Medicine at Keio University, worked hard to establish, work is being done to jointly analyze research data with the cooperation of many universities and hospitals.

The current movement is not limited to specific research areas; it aims to appropriately manage and store research data in all areas worldwide and publish it as much as possible to encourage the reuse of data through approaches previously unthinkable, thereby aiming to create innovation. In Japan as well, albeit belatedly, it has become mandatory for research institutions, including universities, to establish research data policies to support the management, storage, and reuse of research data (6th Science, Technology, and Innovation Basic Plan). The current Keio University Academic Data Management and Utilization Policy was established based on this background.

Specifically, seven items are listed. After Item 1 broadly defines the scope of academic data as that used for the purpose of academic research, Keio University states that it will preserve academic data as much as possible, respect the intentions of the data creators, and build a foundation that can promote utilization as much as possible while considering various factors (Items 2 and 3). On the other hand, researchers are required to formulate research data management plans based on laws and the customs of their research fields, create necessary metadata so that data can be searched, store it appropriately, and publish data to the extent possible (Item 4). However, this is not something imposed only on researchers; it is also clearly stated that Keio University will support such data management, storage, and publication performed by its affiliated researchers (Item 5). Furthermore, since the policy shows the guidelines for Keio University as a whole, specific operational policies are to be created by each department, taking into account the customs of academic fields (Item 6). Trends regarding research data have been changing rapidly in recent years, and it is clearly stated that it is necessary to review the policy in response to those changes (Item 7).

President Kohei Itoh has stated, "Research data is a gift to the next generation." I pray that this policy will serve as a catalyst for preparing "gifts" for many people.