Data Transparency Task Force (DTTF)

This is the text of the mandate given by the governing council of the International Society for Industrial Ecology for the Data Transparency Task Force (DTTF).

Proposal ISIE Task Force – Open Access Industrial Ecology

Documentation and publication of industrial ecology data

Within the ISIE there is a need for better documentation and accessibility of the work of industrial ecologists, to be able to aggregate, validate, and contribute it to the public, policy makers and companies. IE currently lacks harmonized procedures, standards, and a platform to share open access data, as well as a tradition of publishing the data along with research results. These deficiencies represent some important missed opportunities:

i. It hinders the systematic exploitation of IE results for the greater good of society.

ii. The contribution of IE to international assessment efforts, such as those of the IRP, IPCC, and IPBES, are hampered.

iii. Collaboration within the community is made difficult.

iv. Research results of the different members are ‘incompatible’ to one another, limiting comparability and building upon previous work.

This lack of properly formatted, documented, and comparable data is nowhere more evident than in the most detailed and specifically focused on IE methods, life cycle assessment, where longstanding efforts have not lead to work that can easily be contributed to the IPCC assessment process.

It is therefore suggested that ISIE sets down a task force charged with coming up with a set of guidelines and propose or develop a data repository for the publication of data in industrial ecology that could become part of the policy of JIE and would be recommended to other journals. It should address life cycle inventories, but also of material stock and flow data, supply and use tables, and other quantitative information about socioeconomic metabolism.

The policy should address following issues:

● Requirement of publishing and giving access to underlying data for relevant papers where admissible in a community-wide data repository.

● Document and publish the code on a repository (such as Github) in a form that makes results reproducible.

● Encourage the use of ISIE tools & code, fostering its continued development.

● Encourage the use of open source tools formats (e.g. R / Python instead of Matlab) and open data (csv instead of Excel), to avoid copyright issues, facilitate reproducibility and offer interfaces to other tools.

● Options to improve transparency, citation of data, providing credit for making data accessible.

● Suggestions, where appropriate, for data formats and nomenclatures.

● Following questions should be considered in this work:

● What is the current state of documenting IE studies and making accessible data, considering the entire universe of academic and corporate/consultancy work?

● What do available databases or repositories contain and how are they assembled?

● Are available data formats widely used and sufficient?

● What can we learn from open access or subscription-based repositories used in other fields?

● What are opportunities offered by big data approaches?

● What degree of documentation and standardization of published data is desirable?

● What copyright and legal issues need to be solved when distributing data to the community?

● How can published data be critiqued and a learning process implemented?

● Can and should we still give room to publish case studies which do not reveal the underlying data? Under what circumstances is this desirable? How can we work with confidential data?

● What incentives can we provide academic and corporate members to contribute?

● Do ISIE member have data from previous work available that could be gifted to the initial efforts?

The task force should come up with a proposal or a set of recommendations to be presented at the ISIE meeting in Chicago, June 2017 and an editorial piece or column in JIE that goes along with it.

Founding members of the task force: Niko Heeren (ETH), Brandon Kuczenski (UCSB), Guillaume Majeau-Bettez (CIRAIG), Rupert Myers (University of Edinbugh), Stefan Pauliuk (Freiburg), Konstantin Stadler (NTNU).

Niko Heeren and Edgar Hertwich

Zurich/New Haven, September 2016