View source for Help:Copyright issues

'''Openness of information''' is a crucial thing in improving the efficiency of risk assessment work. A large part of the costs of making a risk assessment arises from collecting basic information. There are large quantities of data available, but extracting the right information is expensive due to several reasons: it takes time to go through publication databases and find relevant articles; the data is usually not in a directly usable format, but it needs organising and synthesising; the source of information is copyrighted, and it cannot be used as such without an explicit permission from the copyright owner, usually the journal. To decrease the costs of a risk assessment, relevant information should be systematically collected into a repository that is in public domain, i.e. the contents are freely usable by anyone. Risk assessors and researchers should be encouraged to provide the information they have collected for their own assessments. Such a repository would benefit other assessors and the society at large. The extra work needed from information providers should be acknowledged as work for general good.

In the new risk assessment, the system is designed in a way that increases the availability of information. This is done in three steps, which are:
# collecting information about data sources to the '''[[Help:Data gateway|data gateway]]''',
# collecting information about the substance itself to the '''[[Help:Encyclopedia on environmental health|encyclopedia]]''', and
# organising the information into the structured form as [[Help:Variable|variables]] in '''[[Help:Open risk assessment (toolbox) | open risk assessments]].

'''[[Help:Data gateway|Data gateway]]''' contains meta-data, i.e. information about existing data. All data owners are encouraged to provide information about their data, and also those who are aware of a piece of data should place a short description in the data gateway. The threshold for providing meta-data to the gateway should be kept as low as possible. Even very limited information is often useful, as a critical thing in making a risk assessment may be that some certain information sources are not identified at all. This lack of information is very costly to the assessor, but providing that information is very cheap to someone who knows about the information source. This kind of meta-data is almost always open, and there is rarely any copyright issues related to it.

However, the meta-data alone is not enough for making a risk assessment. Actual data about the variables must be obtained. There are systematic information sources for some kinds of information, such as [http://www.epa-gov/iris IRIS], a database of human health effects that may result from exposure to various substances found in the environment. These sources are extremely valuable for the risk assessment work. However, not all information has been collected and organised in such a systematic way. There are different kinds of information that is needed. Some kinds of information are described in the table below.

{| {{prettytable}}
!Kind of data
!Examples
!Common sources
!Availability issues
|-----
|General descriptions of phenomena and properties
|Things that are basic knowledge for an expert, e.g.: "why dioxins are harmful?"
|Textbooks, reviews
|Easily found with some effort
|-----
|Established properties of e.g. chemicals or populations
|Common and routinely used building blocks in risk assessments: octanol-water partition coefficients or population age structures
|Existing databases
|Easily found if data sources are known
|-----
|Necessary but not established properties
|Average concentrations of or exposures to a particular chemical in a particular area or population
|Scientific articles
|Hard work to go through literature. The author or journal has the copyright for republishing.
|-----
|Detailed measurement data about properties
|Data from studies on individual observation level
|Usually not available or only at request<sup>*</sup>
|The need to protect individual privacy limits the availability. Researchers often not willing to give their data.
|}

<sup>*</sup>Recently, there has been an increasing trend of publishing the data together with the article as supporting material, or providing the data to an open repository.