Data Access

What is it?

Data access refers to the availability and retrieval of environmental data. Accessibility opens doors for collaboration, replication, and increased data-driven decision making. Some data, however, contains sensitive information that needs to be protected, and access limited, to ensure the safety and privacy of individuals. In these cases, data can be limited to those who are part of the project team in charge of data management.

The following practices and tools can be of help when considering data accessibility:

• The FAIR Principles: The A in FAIR stands for accessibility. From the GO FAIR website: “Once the user finds the required data, she/he/they need to know how they can be accessed, possibly including authentication and authorisation.”
• Metadata, or information used to describe a dataset, can also support data discoverability by providing easy-to-search-for terms and information about the data. Comprehensive metadata also supports deeper understanding of how the data was collected, how it should be used, and other important contextual information.

Questions to ask when considering access to your project’s data:

• Who should be responsible for assigning access?
• Who might benefit from access to the data and why?
• How should the data be accessed or shared?
• What are the limitations of data usage once the data is accessed?
• What standards and procedures are in place to ensure clear accessibility guidelines?
• If data should or will be made public, how can data stewards ensure easy access, through a download button, API, or contact information, for example?
• How can data stewards understand who is accessing the data and for what purposes?

Why is it important?

When data is accessible, its value can be unlocked for different kinds of uses, far more than originally intended. For example, if a community science initiative is collecting water quality data regarding PFAS contaminants in a local stream, they can make that data accessible by hosting it online on a publicly accessible website and providing metadata. This allows for other stakeholders, such as local government or researchers to utilize this data for their own purposes like providing data as evidence when restructuring local ordinances or when studying the effects of local landfills and industrial sites on local waterways.

While not all data needs to be public, having a data access strategy can increase the data privacy and security by putting checks in place to ensure the data is not manipulated or tampered with by unauthorized parties.

**Mentioned and additional resources:

• To examine a model for data access in the field of hydrology, see A data sharing method in the open web environment: Data sharing in hydrology.
• For more on the importance of accessible environmental data and the impacts it has, see Climate data can save lives. Most countries can’t access it.
• For an example of how accessible open data can assist in environmental disaster planning, see this case study of the Brumadinho Dam disaster: Open data could have helped us learn from another mining dam disaster.