In order to facilitate and encourage the use of data held by public sector bodies for the purposes of scientific research, public sector bodies are encouraged to develop a harmonised approach and harmonised processes to make that data easily accessible for the purposes of scientific research in the public interest. That could mean, inter alia, creating streamlined administrative procedures, standardised data formatting, informative metadata on the methodological and data collection choices and standardised data fields that enable the easy joining of data sets from different public sector data sources where relevant for the purposes of analysis. The objective of those practices should be to promote the publicly funded and produced data for the purposes of scientific research in accordance with the principle of ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’.
