The Swiss Academy of Science in organising an event in Bern on Monday, October 29 on Open Data and Data Management - Issues and Challenges. I look forward to taking part, among other reasons to hear the talk by space scientist Nicolas Thomas. An excerpt from an interview published this week addresses some common concerns in our community:
In the more general cases of Open Data, the key question to ask is «why is the data set being released?» If you want a community to work with that data, then the archiving aspects are time consuming and therefore cost manpower. Badly documented data is useless or a further time sink for the producer because he/she ends up spending half their time answering emails about how to use the data. My fear is that these tasks are underestimated severely by those people advocating Open Data. In addition, I wonder whether appropriate standards are available in all fields of research to support this.
More information at naturwissenschaften.ch
Update: my notes on the topic, taken together with @heluc who was also in the audience, can be found here: