Help:Copyright issues

Openness of information is a crucial thing 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 that 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 to increase the availability of information. This is done in three steps, which are

1. collecting information about data sources to the data gateway,
2. collecting information about the substance itself to the encyclopedia, and
3. organising the information into the structured for as variables in open risk assessments.

Data gateway contains metadata, 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 metadata 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 is that some 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 metadata is almost always open, and there is rarely copyright issues related to it.

However, the metadata 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 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, and some kinds of information is described in the table below.

Kind of data	Examples	Common sources	Availability issues
General descriptions of phenomena and properties	Things that are basic knowledge for an expert: "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*	The need to protect individual privacy limits the availability. Researchers often not willing to give their data.

^*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.