Geographic Data for Academic Research: Assessing Access Policies

Data availability is a key issue affecting the collective well-being of society. Economic and legal scholars have argued that the current, relatively open, access-to-data environment in the United States is beneficial to advancing knowledge and the economy. However, little empirical evidence exists to validate the extent to which various access policy environments do or do not contribute to the productivity of academic researchers. Our research aimed to evidence support or lack of support of various data policies in the context of access to, and use of, geographic data within the university research environment. We synthesized a set of twenty-three recommended access-to-data principles from recommendations set forth in the literature. An online questionnaire strove to gain sufficient information to determine whether recommended principles were adhered to in the acquisition of each specific data set and whether scientists were productive in their use of such data sets. Productivity was assessed in terms of five measures. We hypothesized that data-sharing relationships would be more productive for science if the data policies confronted by scientists in their use of digital geographic data conformed with the recommended policies advocated in the literature. The data indicated relatively clear statistical significance in testing the principles of “adherence to pricing at marginal cost or less” and “provision for availability of metadata.” Correlated with the productivity of scientists, the collected survey data evidenced non-support of the first principle and support of the second. The latter finding suggests that government, private sector, and academic suppliers of geographic data should give high priority to the documentation of metadata in order to stimulate the more widespread use of available spatial data. This article describes the survey and statistical methods employed in researching this problem and presents the results of testing the two recommended principles. The implications of the findings are discussed.