New Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste Data Policy

The Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A (Elettra from now on) Board of Directors endorsed the implementation of an updated Data Policy for data collected at the Elettra and FERMI beamlines. The Data Policy, approved in 2019, is based on the PaNdata Data Policy, which was a deliverable of the European FP7 project PaN-data Europe in 2011.

The Elettra scientific data policy complies the FAIR principles detailed below. The Data Policy defines Elettra as the custodian of raw data and metadata. Elettra will provide users with automatically collected or manually provided metadata for all peer-reviewed experiments carried out on the Elettra and FERMI beamlines. The data and metadata will be stored in a dedicated Catalogue enabling online access, browse and download. The experimental team will have sole access to the data during a three-year embargo period, renewable for additional two years upon request of the Principal Investigator (PI). After the embargo, the data will be available under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license to registered users of the Elettra data portal. Data generated on beamlines implementing the data policy will be persistently identified by an automatically generated DOI, so they could be be readily cited in publications.

The Elettra data policy comes very timely as the scientific landscape in Europe and worldwide changes. Recently the Springer group announced that all their journals (which include Nature and related publications) will require data in publications be covered by a data policy. The Elettra data policy will enable users to publish results derived from data taken at the Elettra without further action on their part other than referring to the Elettra data policy.

The submission of an experiment proposal is bound by the acceptance of the Data Policy. Accepting the policy does not mean that all beamlines are yet able to implement the policy.

FAIR Principles

FAIR data are data which meet standards of FINDABILITY, ACCESSIBILITY, INTEROPERABILITY, and REUSABILITY. A publication by a consortium of scientists and organizations (Wilkinsons et al., Sci. Data, 2016) originally defined the "FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship". The FAIR data principles are central for Open Science and their acceptance is a must to be able to participate to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). It is expected that, in the near future, all figures and tables published in scientific journals will have to be linked to the corresponding raw data, to ensure verification of the reproducibility of central findings. 

The FAIR principles are stated here:

• Findability: Raw data will be associated by a permanent unique identifier (DOI) and will saved together with the associated meta data and will be searchable through a web based online catalogue.
• Accessibility: The above mentioned catalogue will provide accessibility to the data sets.
• Interoperability: The raw data will be saved in a data format ensuring interoperability; The chosen data formats are HDF5 and, possibly, Nexus/HFD5: these formats implement interoperable standard that can be read by most scientific analysis and visualization software tools. They allow to save data and meta-data in the same file, enabling faster access.
• Reusability: After the embargo period the datasets will be made openly available through a searchable online web catalogue. Usage will be enabled under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.

Elettra commits to these principles and will fully implement them in the coming years through the support provided by European funded projects.

Implementation

The deadline for implementing the data policy on all Elettra beamlines is in 2022. In order to keep users informed of progress of the implementation of the data policy the following table summarizes the state of the implementation on the different beamlines.

Any questions concerning the Data Policy or its implementation can be addressed to datapolicy@elettra.eu.

Additional resources

• The PaN data guideline for a common Scientific Data Policy:
  http://pan-data.eu/sites/pan-data.eu/files/PaN-data-D2-1.pdf
• The Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste Scientific Data Policy:
  https://www.elettra.trieste.it/userarea/scientific-data-policy.html
• The ALBA Synchrotron Data Policy:
  https://www.cells.es/en/users/call-information-1/bases/2017_07_data_policy_alba_approved-cr.pdf/view
• The ESRF Data Policy:
  https://www.esrf.eu/datapolicy
• The MAX IV Data Policy:
  https://www.maxiv.lu.se/wp-content/plugins/alfresco-plugin/ajax/downloadFile.php?object_id=d606d8dc-4593-413f-8261-b1fa7dc46184
• The Diamond Data Policy:
  https://www.diamond.ac.uk/Users/Policy-Documents/Policies/Experimental-Data-Management-Pol.html
• The PSI data policy:
  https://www.psi.ch/en/science/psi-data-policy
• The Soleil data Policy:
  https://www.synchrotron-soleil.fr/en/news/soleil-establishes-data-management-policy
• The ESS Data Policy:
  https://europeanspallationsource.se/data-management-software
• The ILL Data Policy:
  https://www.ill.eu/en/users/user-guide/after-your-experiment/data-management/
• The EuXFEL Data Policy:
  https://www.xfel.eu/users/experiment_support/policies/scientific_data_policy/index_eng.html
• NeXUS format:
  https://www.nexusformat.org
  Wilkinson, Mark D et al. "The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship". Scientific Datavolume 3, Article number: 160018 (2016). doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.18.