Open government data and environmental science: a federal Canadian perspective

Governments worldwide are releasing data into the public domain via open government data initiatives. Many such data sets are directly relevant to environmental science and complement data collected by academic researchers to address complex and challenging environmental problems. The Government of Canada is a leader in open data among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, generating and releasing troves of valuable research data. However, achieving comprehensive and FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) open government data is not without its challenges. For example, identifying and understanding Canada’s international commitments, policies, and guidelines on open data can be daunting. Similarly, open data sets within the Government of Canada are spread across a diversity of repositories and portals, which may hinder their discoverability. We describe Canada’s federal initiatives promoting open government data, and outline where data sets of relevance to environmental science can be found. We summarize research data management challenges identified by the Government of Canada, plans to modernize the approach to open data for environmental science and best practices for data discoverability, access, and reuse.