Lund Declaration on Maximising the Benefits of Research Data

The Lund Declaration on Maximizing the Benefits of Research Data was presented on the closing day of the conference organised by the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the EU, titled "The Potential of Research Data: How Research Infrastructures Provide New Opportunities and Benefits for Society"(19-20 June 2023, Lund).

Minister for Education Mats Persson, Deputy Director-General of Research and Innovation Signe Ratso of the European Commission and, representing the upcoming Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU, Secretary-General for Research Raquel Yotti presented a declaration on how society can increase the benefits of research data.

According to the declaration, the EU needs to make better secondary use of data to improve its research and innovation performance. Importantly, the Swedish government warns that research outputs are still not readily available for reuse, leading to less efficient use of resources, as “implementation and harmonisation of FAIR and open research data policies is slow and uneven across Europe,”  and calls for "new reward models for research data producers", among others.

Anna Panagopoulou, Director for ERA and Innovation at the Commission’s research directorate, agreed that more needs to be done. There are still plenty of researchers not putting their data in open repositories, and plenty of others who do not even know what FAIR is, she said during the Conference.

Read the full declaration here (.pdf).