The Impact of CODATA on Global Data Sharing

Every scientific discovery rests on data, but data is only useful if it can be trusted, found, and shared. In the decades after World War II, the volume of measurements pouring out of laboratories grew so rapidly that scientists feared much of it would simply be lost. The response to this challenge was an international body dedicated to organising the world’s scientific data. Understanding how this committee works reveals a great deal about how modern research operates across borders and disciplines.

The origin and development of CODATA 🔗

The Committee on Data for Science and Technology, known as CODATA, was established in 1966 by the 11th General Assembly of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). The decision was taken at a meeting held in Bombay (now Mumbai), giving the organisation an early connection to this part of the world. Its first working meeting followed soon after in Paris in June 1966.

The reasons behind its creation were practical. After the Second World War, the number of scientists grew rapidly across the developed world, and new automated instruments made it possible to take measurements far more efficiently than before. These two changes produced an explosion in the amount of data appearing in journals, handbooks and repositories. By the early 1960s, scientific leaders recognised that this flood of information was overwhelming the traditional ways of publishing and retrieving data, and that valuable measurements risked being lost to future generations entirely.

CODATA was the coordinated international answer to that problem. It was set up to promote and encourage, on a worldwide basis, the compilation, evaluation and dissemination of reliable numerical data of importance to science and technology. The committee deals with all kinds of quantitative data from the physical, biological, geological and astronomical sciences, whether produced through experiment, observation or calculation.

From ICSU to the International Science Council 🔗

The parent body has changed over time. ICSU, the organisation that founded CODATA, was renamed and reformed into the International Science Council (ISC) in 2018. As part of this shift, the committee itself is now formally called the Committee on Data of the International Science Council, though the well-known abbreviation CODATA has been kept. The organisation is headquartered in Paris and serves members across the globe.

A history shaped by select membership 🔗

The early structure of CODATA was deliberately limited. In its initial years membership was extended only to a small number of scientifically advanced countries, welcoming a select set of national committees rather than opening fully to all nations. This created an early imbalance in who controlled and contributed to international data networks. Over the following decades the committee broadened its membership considerably and shifted its focus toward making data benefits available to a much wider global community, including developing economies.

The functions of CODATA 🔗

The central purpose of CODATA is straightforward to state but ambitious in scope. It works to improve the quality, reliability, management and accessibility of data across all fields of science and technology, acting as a resource that gives scientists and engineers access to international data activities for greater awareness, cooperation and new knowledge. Three connected functions sit at the heart of this work.

Improving data quality and reliability 🔗

Raw data is not automatically trustworthy. Measurements may contain errors, uncertainties may be expressed inconsistently, and different laboratories may produce results that conflict. A major part of CODATA’s role is the careful evaluation of data so that researchers can rely on it. The committee places particular emphasis on problems that are common across different disciplines and on data that is used outside the field in which it was first generated. This matters because a value measured by a physicist may later be needed by an engineer or a chemist who has no easy way to judge its accuracy.

Facilitating international cooperation 🔗

Science is a global activity, and data produced in one country is valuable to researchers everywhere. CODATA’s mission is to strengthen international science for the benefit of society by promoting improved scientific and technical data management and use. The committee pursues this through standing committees, task groups and working groups, and by working closely with the scientific unions and associations connected to the ISC. It also supports major international gatherings such as SciDataCon and International Data Week, and publishes the open-access Data Science Journal, all of which bring data professionals from different countries together.

Managing intellectual property and data policy 🔗

Sharing data widely raises difficult questions about ownership, copyright and licensing. Who owns a dataset? Under what conditions can others reuse it? CODATA addresses these issues through its International Data Policy Committee, which shapes policy studies, guidelines and standards that promote data quality, reliability and integrity while upholding ethical principles. The guiding philosophy is captured in a simple principle: data should be as open as possible and as closed as necessary. This recognises that openness is the goal, but that privacy, security and legitimate intellectual property rights sometimes require limits.

These tensions are real. As researchers have noted, intellectual property, copyright and licensing policies need to be well defined to give adequate protection and reduce conflicts over data ownership between individuals, private institutions and the public sector. CODATA’s policy work aims to provide that clarity at an international level.

CODATA’s influence on scientific research 🔗

The practical value of CODATA becomes clearest when looking at what it actually produces and how researchers use it every day.

The fundamental physical constants 🔗

The most famous output of CODATA is its set of fundamental physical constants. The Task Group on Fundamental Physical Constants, established in 1969, periodically provides the international scientific community with an internationally accepted set of values for the basic constants of physics and chemistry, along with related conversion factors for use worldwide. The first such set was published in 1973.

These are not minor technical details. They are the values for quantities such as the speed of light, the Planck constant and the electron mass that appear in calculations across physics, chemistry and engineering. The task group produces a new least-squares adjustment of these constants on a four-year cycle, drawing on all relevant experimental and theoretical data available at the time. The most recent release is the 2022 set, which was published in 2024 and is based on all data available through the end of 2022.

The process of producing these values does more than supply numbers. Analysing such a broad range of information can uncover errors in calculations or experiments, re-express all uncertainties in a consistent way, reveal inconsistencies between different results, and even stimulate new research where weaknesses are found. The review articles describing each adjustment are among the most highly cited in the scientific literature.

The importance of this work was demonstrated dramatically in recent years. To support the 2019 redefinition of the International System of Units (SI), adopted by the General Conference on Weights and Measures in November 2018, CODATA made a special release of constant values. The redefinition based units such as the kilogram on fixed values of fundamental constants rather than physical objects, and CODATA’s data made this transition possible.

Reliable data across many fields 🔗

CODATA’s influence reaches well beyond physics. It is concerned with data from experiments, observations and calculations across every field, including the physical sciences, biology and geology. When a biologist needs accurate thermodynamic values, or a geologist needs reliable reference data for minerals, well-evaluated and standardised data saves enormous time and reduces the risk of error. By providing trustworthy reference points, the committee allows researchers to build on solid foundations rather than repeating verification work that has already been done.

Advancing open science and FAIR data 🔗

In recent decades CODATA has placed open science at the centre of its strategy. It promotes the idea that research data should be FAIR, meaning Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. These principles ensure that data can be located, understood and reused by both humans and computer systems, which is increasingly important in an age of large datasets and automated analysis. The committee’s strategic priorities include promoting open data policies, advancing the frontiers of data science, and building the data skills that national science systems need.

Building capacity, including in India 🔗

A significant part of CODATA’s modern work involves training researchers in countries with developing and emerging economies, so that the benefits of the data revolution are shared rather than concentrated. The committee runs the CODATA-RDA Schools of Research Data Science specifically to address the needs of young researchers in lower and middle income countries and to prevent an unequal ability to use data from becoming another aspect of the digital divide.

This work has a strong presence here. In March 2015, CODATA and the Indian Statistical Institute, together with the Documentation Research and Training Centre in Bangalore, ran an international training workshop on Big Data. Earlier, SciDataCon 2014, an international conference on data sharing for global sustainability, was jointly organised by the CODATA India National Committee and the Indian National Science Academy at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. A further capacity-building workshop on big data for science and sustainability was held in Hyderabad in March 2017. These activities show how a global data body connects directly with the research community in this country.

Why CODATA matters for the study of information 🔗

For anyone studying how information is organised and shared, CODATA is an instructive example. It demonstrates the full lifecycle of scientific data, from compilation and evaluation through to dissemination and reuse. It shows how questions of data quality, standardisation, ownership and access are not merely technical but require international coordination and clear policy. As research becomes ever more data-intensive, the kind of stewardship that CODATA pioneered grows steadily more important to the entire scientific enterprise.

What do you think? If reliable shared data can accelerate discovery so dramatically, where should the line fall between keeping research data open for everyone and protecting legitimate concerns about privacy and ownership? And how might better data-sharing systems change the way research is done in developing economies over the next decade?

References

1. https://council.science/member/committee-on-data-codata/
2. https://nrc.canada.ca/en/research-development/research-collaboration/library-data-collections/codata-canada
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Data_of_the_International_Science_Council
4. https://online.ucpress.edu/gp/article/5/1/121640/203104/Data-Rules-What-the-History-of-Scientific-Data-Can
5. https://itlaw.fandom.com/wiki/Committee_on_Data_for_Science_and_Technology
6. https://codata.org/initiatives/data-policy/international-data-policy-committee/
7. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666154324001947
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CODATA_TGFC
9. https://codata.org/initiatives/data-science-and-stewardship/fundamental-physical-constants/
10. https://www.nist.gov/publications/codata-recommended-values-fundamental-physical-constants-2022
11. https://codata.org/initiatives/data-skills/research-data-science-summer-schools/
12. https://codata.org/events/training-workshops/
13. https://codata.org/india/
14. http://codata.org/blog/category/pastd/