Building Trust: Data Metrics as a Focal Point for Responsible Data Stewardship

The widespread adoption of open data practices has resulted in a wealth of open data sets and increased attention on data as a public asset. In order to fulfill responsible data stewardship, we must move beyond enabling data access and take steps to understand how administrative and research data are found, accessed, and reused. We need standardized evaluations of data usage to assess whether and how open data advances policy, science, and society, and this can only happen through evidence-based data metrics. To catalyze adoption of data metrics, the Make Data Count Summit convened representatives from government agencies and research-supporting organizations to tackle current challenges and explore actionable next steps. The multi-stakeholder discussions highlighted that the building blocks to reliably developing data metrics are now in place. Through community-built tools and infrastructure, it is now possible to make connections between data and other objects and to make those available to the community at a scale not possible before. Building on these connections, administration and research communities are exploring how to incorporate data evaluation into their processes. Much remains to be done, but the current challenges and gaps around data discoverability and usability can serve as prompts to focus the next steps in community efforts and the questions to address through bibliometric studies. We outline immediate priorities for government agencies, funders, institutions, publishers, and researchers to drive adoption of data metrics. The recommended next steps are possible through support for the technical infrastructure in place and compliance policies across institutions, and are underscored by a collective commitment to building trust. For data metrics to be trusted, they must be in alignment to the principles that underlie open data. The development and adoption of open data metrics must be prioritized now for the responsible stewardship of data as a public asset.