Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and disasters related to climate change have taught us the value of open data by underscoring the importance of open health and science data in managing crises. As the demand for data is increasing, open data has remained a critical factor in facilitating better access to data and promoting data use, data linkage to policy, and showing the impact and value of data. But where do we stand on the status of open data? Open Data Watch’s Open Data Inventory and PARIS21’s Partner Report on Support to Official Statistics show that the state of open data across the world still lags. One underlying issue is lack of political support leading to inadequate funding for NSOs to respond to the demand for more and better data systems. Another issue is the need to promote data use. However, the official statistics and data-for-development community still struggle with quantifying and measuring data use to truly understand the value of open data in official statistics.

This intervention will discuss the importance of data for building trust and facilitating use, the state of open data in official statistics, and the remaining unknowns in understanding the true value of data. Several practical steps to increase access to and use of data are considered. These include adopting a standard method based on digital object identifiers (DOI) for citing datasets and their metadata; providing free or low-cost access to publications that use open data in their analysis; and assisting national statistics offices to overcome the legal and technical obstacles to providing access to census, survey, and administrative microdata.