Emerging trends in open research data

Open Data is gaining much importance among different stakeholders and is being widely accepted as vital component for decision making and result oriented research activities at global level. The collaborative research activities have greatly been benefited by the availability of Open Research Data. The open data encourages transparency and democratic control by encouraging participation, facilitating self-empowerment and providing provisions for improved efficiency and effectiveness of government services and creation of new knowledge from existing data sets. The availability of Open Research data in different subject areas enhances research quality by encouraging broader visibility and sharing provisions among globally distributed community members. This scenario greatly encourages the economic re-usage of existing open research datasets in local research environments for timely and more precise comparative results. The paper thus attempts to analyse the open research data repositories in different setups available at re3 data registry and to ascertain various aspects like content type, access privileges, growth in terms of subject areas and countries, uploading and downloading facilities, data harvesting and retrieval provisions etc.