Open scientific data or open research data is a type of open data focused on publishing observations and results of scientific activities available for anyone to analyze and reuse. A major purpose of the drive for open data is to allow the verification of scientific claims, by allowing others to look at the reproducibility of results,^[1] and to allow data from many sources to be integrated to give new knowledge.^[2]

The modern concept of scientific data emerged in the second half of the 20th century, with the development of large knowledge infrastructure to compute scientific information and observation. The sharing and distribution of data has been early identified as an important stake but was impeded by the technical limitations of the infrastructure and the lack of common standards for data communication. The World Wide Web was immediately conceived as a universal protocol for the sharing of scientific data, especially coming from high-energy physics.

Definition

Scientific data

The concept of open scientific data has developed in parallel with the concept of scientific data.

Scientific data was not formally defined until the late 20th century. Before the generalization of computational analysis, data has been mostly an informal terms, frequently used interchangeably with knowledge or information.