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According to open government principles, public administration should make its data available to the public to create transparency, accountability, and to facilitate participation in public decision-making. Open-Data Policies (ODPs) were developed to encourage the opening of governmental data to the public, but require collaboration and awareness from all levels of government. Gaming has proved to be successful for creating awareness. Yet the pandemic hinders in-person gameplay, and there is a need for an online game that can be played remotely. This research uses an in-person game as the starting point to develop an online collaborative digital game. The feature and design choices of the digital game are described, along with its main differences when compared to the in-person one. The essential features include interaction and discussion about open data among players, the assignment of different roles, and points awarded when making the right decision to open, partially share, or close a dataset.

The implementation of open data policies requires the efforts of many public employees across different levels of government, who may be unaware of the benefits and risks of open data. Serious games have demonstrated potential for training in a professional environment. For this research, a collaborative digital serious game about open data was developed. A sample of 24 civil servants played the game. Pre-test and post-test surveys were used to evaluate the effects of the game on participants’ perception of open data. Likert score changes between pre-test and post-test indicated that the game had a positive effect on the willingness to share public sector data. By simulating the setting of a public office and by having players make decisions about whether to open certain datasets, the game facilitated learning about the benefits and disadvantages of opening data.

The actual opening of government data is done by civil servants operating within their institutional environment. As such, the institutional environment and their behavior towards the opening of data is key to increase the quality and quantity of open data. However, few studies have analyzed the behavior of government professionals towards open data policy. The objective of this paper is to review the existing literature to find the factors that influences civil servants behaviors towards open data. To identify the drivers and barriers, a literature review was performed listing the most cited papers with "open government data"and "barriers"focusing specific at the behavioral related factors. Even with the increasing of research on the topic of open data, still most of the papers focus on user drivers and barriers rather than on provider challenges. Even less studies focus on the civil servants' individual level of factors influencing their support to the release of governmental data. Most barriers found in the literature are related to infrastructural or technical issues. Whereas some individual level behavioral barriers could be found, including culture, lack of individual incentives and misunderstanding the impact of opening data, broader discussions on social norms, lack of education and experience are still missing in the literature. This paper contributes to the need for deeper understanding of the behavioral factors that influences the civil servants to support the opening of data.

The purpose of this paper is to explore current data management training needs and practices for Belmont Forum member agencies and researchers to inform a Toolkit. Fourteen Belmont Forum affiliated individuals were interviewed following a predetermined set of questions to create data curation profiles of their funded work. The data curation profile questionnaire includes questions related to data management, storage, stakeholders, costs, training, and credentials. The interview findings highlight gaps in existing knowledge of data management theory and practice that could impact data re-use. Results of these interviews were used to populate a Toolkit of data management training and effective practice resources specifically developed to train Belmont Forum grant awardees. The results also highlight some attitudes and behaviours of current scientists, researchers, and agency representatives, and the impact of the implementation of data management plans on the open science movement.

A study was conducted on the role of research institute libraries in supporting open data research policies to improve scientific communication. The study aims to determine the role of libraries in open data research policies to improve scientific communication, and determine the role of libraries in relation to the open data research movement in building scientific communication. The research was conducted using the narrative review method, which is research that is carried out looking for articles related to the study of the role of research institutes libraries in open data research policies to improve scientific communication. namely data management plans and research data sharing processes, ensuring the data can be accessed, storing data in repositories and ensuring data can be accessed within a certain period of time. Libraries are the pioneers of the open data research movement by providing consultancy services for data analysis, research data mining, data curation services, data analysis and visualization, and saving research data over a long period of time. The main support provided by the library in building scientific communication is to create meta data and store data in repositories. Provide training in the management and storage of research data for researchers with the aim that the resulting research data can be used and disseminated for further research

Developing open government by local government is cumbersome. Many local governments have no policies or are struggling to develop policies enabling to create value from open data. Policy-making is challenging due to the wicked nature of many policy problems, unclear objectives, and the involvement of diverse stakeholders. At the same time governments are opening their policy-making processes for participation by citizens and private companies. The goal of this paper is to present the structure of a game to increase the understanding of open-data policies by local governments. Open Data Policies are aimed at making public data available to be accessed and used by civil society. The game participants can experience the implications of various policies. This should help them to developed better policies.