Page 257 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

256 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 7, 2015

Status analysis and comparison of research achievements on open data policy
and an estimation of the research trends in China
1 ∗
Haiqun MA & Pan PU

The relevant conferences about open data and big data were hosted frequently in recent years, and
the day of international open data was set up to support and encourage governments to implement
open data policy. China has already accelerated its steps in research and practices.
This paper proceeds the literature retrieval based on the databases of CNKI and three foreign
database including Web of Science, Emerald and ELSEVIER(SD). The keywords includes “open
data”,“data opening” and “policy”, etc. It aims to precede the subject analysis and comparative
study on the current research achievements of open data policy home and abroad.
The main research issues include open data policy framework, open scientific data policy, open
data policy in specific fields, political research of protecting the fundamental rights of citizens
in the process of opening data via the content analysis method and etc. This article explores the
characteristics of related research at home and abroad and the deficiency of existing study in
China. The authors estimate six potential research trends in open data policy research: open data
policy in a professional field, policy of encouraging the development of data processing and
analysis tools, open policy of different kinds of data, policy to protect the fundamental rights of
related stakeholders, the demand of open data policy at the national level and standardization
research, and the cooperation of open data policy and data security policy.
The main research methods of this paper include content analysis and comparison. The results
of literature retrieval are inducted and summarized via content analysis and the research values of
relevant literature are analyzed and explored. The authors compare and analyze the same research
issues of open data policy home and abroad in order to seek the common ground, find differences,
and then to predict the research tendency.
The research conclusions point out that the diversity of type of open data policy should be paid
attention to during the research course of open data policy. From the projects such as “MyData” in
England and “Open Your Body Data”, we can see that besides government data, public data and
scientific data, which are emphasized in most of the researches, business data and personal data
have enormous open potential in the mean time. In addition, the research results also emphasized
that the future research should notice the coordination between open data policy and data security
policy for data opening and protection is the two interwoven strands of power. Only when
contradiction of data opening and security is handled timely, a nationwide effective configuration
for information resources can be realized in China.
The paper systematically studies the characteristics of relevant research on open data policy at
home and abroad, and the deficiencies of researches in China through comparative analysis of

* Correspondence should be addressed to Haiqun MA, Email: mahaiqun@sina.com.cn, ORCID: 0000-0002-2091-7620