I gave a presentation at Nordic Love Data Week 2026 on February 11, as part of the Wednesday afternoon session (13:00–14:30 CET).
The talk was titled “Data Available on Unreasonable Request”, a deliberately provocative title that questions the assumption that all research data should be made openly available by default.
The core argument: not all datasets are worth opening. I am sorry, I know you love your data and you think it is the most imporant data in the world, but often its reuse value is close to zero. Setting”blanket” open-data policies can waste resources and create a flood of low-quality, poorly documented datasets that nobody reuses. Instead, we should be honest about when data openness genuinely serves science, and focus our efforts on datasets that have real discovery potential:curated, well-documented, and reusable.
The session also included a talk on responsible data preservation by Mari Elisa Kuusiniemi from the University of Helsinki, making for a nice pairing of perspectives on data preservation and reuse.
Slides are available on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/18609058