[open-science] On expressing access constraints in a repository of mixed openness

[Chris Rusbridge]

OK I'm looking for some more help again. I'm hoping that at the very least the discipline of writing down my concern will help me understand it better, and at best you guys have a solution.

Let's imagine an institutional data repository (which I guess could be a set of different repositories). By definition, the IDR will have data that have different degrees of openness. I can distinguish at least these conditions:

a) fully open
b) closed until some condition is met (then to be open)
c) closed unless some condition is met
d) closed indefinitely.

I'm not really sure an IDR would actually want to accept data with condition (d), but there may be good reasons that escape me at the moment. But however much one would like all data to be open, there are substantial swags of data that must be temporarily or partially closed.

Independently of conditions (b) to (d), it is possible that some or all of the metadata might be open, that is to say the data might be discoverable even if not open (presumably if you found and wanted to use the data, then some sort of negotiation would have to take place).

My question is: how could constraints like these sensibly be expressed, in either a human-readable or (better) machine-readable way?

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Chris Rusbridge
Mobile: +44 791 7423828
Email: c.rusbridge at gmail.com