WDS Asia-Oceania Network
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1. General Concept
The WDS Asia-Oceania (A&O) Network is a platform to reinforce capacity-building activities on data led by the WDS community in the A&O area to create a collaborative network to reinforce local-based efforts on the preservation and the provision of science data. This activity has been initiated when the WDS International Programme Office was hosted by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Tokyo, Japan, from 2011- to 2021. During this interval, international conferences on the current status of data-related activities in the A&O area were held three times (2017, 2019, and 2020, respectively as shown on the dedicated page of this site). Several problems, shown below, were clarified in these activities:
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There exists a big difference in the level of data-oriented activity
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A large amount of data are being obtained by international collaborations in this area but preserved and opened mainly by repositories in advanced countries
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Weak infrastructure on data, and lack of manpower
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The most of established data centers are governmental, operating under mandated rules. The motivation for addressing Open Science is not high.
As an action to resolve these problems, the National WDS Committee of the Science Council of Japan decided to create this website to support grassroots activities by unifying efforts to create a collaborative network among data repositories and data-oriented scientists having sympathy for the endeavor of WDS. WDS is supporting also regional activities on science data in Africa and Latin America and Caribbean. The Committee on Data (CODATA) of the International Science Council (ISC) is also perusing Open-Science activities through collaborations with its national members in these areas (e.g. African Open Science Platform). Collaborations with these activities will be particularly important. It is important also to collaborate with the Science Council of Asia (SCA) to involve scientists from wider disciplines and administrative people in managing policy decisions on science in the A&O nations.
2. Structure and Membership
The WDS A&O Network is a voluntary organization consisting of collaborative data repositories and data networks. Information on members can be seen via the list shown below:
In this stage, the Network is supported by participants in the previous WDS A&O conferences. We keep in contact with international organizations on data e.g. CODATA, RDA, and ORCID. In the next step, we are planning to construct a portal of data held by the members of the Network. A conceptual diagram of the WDS A&O Network is shown below.