CORPORATE RELATIONSHIPS

Corporate Relationships



Corporate Relationships

The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) welcomes the opportunity to comment. NERC is one of the UK's eight Research Councils. It funds and carries out impartial scientific research in the sciences of the environment. NERC trains the next generation of independent environmental scientists. Its priority research areas are: Earth's life-support systems, climate change, and sustainable economies.

NERC's research centres are: the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the British Geological Survey (BGS), the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) and the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory (POL). NERC's comments draw on inputs from BAS, CEH, POL, the Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU), the Southampton Oceanography Centre (SOC) and Swindon Office staff. BGS has provided comments separately. The comments are made according to the 10 criteria listed in the review's terms of reference.

In the conduct of NERC's business, scientists often consider the end point of their research to be the production of publications, whether in open literature or in the form of reports to customers. While these form one output from scientific activity, science in general and environmental science in particular involves the collection of data, and the subsequent management of these data is implicit in NERC's mission. While data will indeed be manipulated by the researcher to provide material for publication, data are a resource in their own right. Properly managed and preserved, they can potentially be used and re-used by future researchers, and exploited commercially or educationally. Such further uses, often never envisaged in the first instance, will make an additional contribution to NERC's objectives.

Environmental data are often irreplaceable; they are always unique, if only in the timing of collection. They can also be extremely expensive to collect. For these reasons NERC attaches great importance to ensuring that maximum benefits are derived from data once acquired.

Their full implementation must inevitably be an evolutionary process since some aspects of policy can only be achieved when concomitant funding is available. As a first step it is essential that the policies and their implications are understood at a management level throughout the NERC community. Managers will then need to ensure that appropriate guidance is passed down to all who need it within their organisations.

Scientific data' may be held in either analogue or digital form and be stored either on paper or a variety of computer-compatible media. There is a spectrum running from 'raw data' through 'processed data' to 'information' and ultimately 'knowledge. The material held by libraries, and the physical specimens in curated collections, might be regarded as 'data', although they are outside the usual sense of the word. It would be idle to attempt a rigid definition of the term'data'. These policy guidelines have generally been designed with digital, computer-based datasets in mind, although the principles can often be extended to cover a wider field. 'Data' so defined still exhibit considerable diversity. For example, there are: major computer-based databases which are continuously managed and extended by the validation and addition of incoming data from multiple sources; the output files from computer-based predictive ...