Public Servants’ Perception Towards Publishing Quality and Impactful Open Data to Support Open Science Initiatives in Malaysia

Abstract

Open Data Portal is the key intervention of e-Government initiative for information management. The Government of Malaysia has introduced the initiatives since 2015 to facilitate open data portal and strengthen transparency governance. This Open Data is crucial because it provides significant benefits to government in term of political, social, economic, operational, and technical. However, World Bank’s Open Data Readiness Assessment (ODRA) for Malaysia stated that despite the clear evidence of readiness and the country’s data-rich environment, it was significantly difficult to access high- quality data from Malaysia. As a result, lower scores on impact criterion in three consecutive years has landed Malaysia on 53rd of the ranking of the Global Open Data Barometer. Therefore, the objectives of this research re to determine the general perception of public servants toward open data initiatives and to identify determinants that impede the publication of open government data by the existing government entity. This research adopted qualitative method through semi-structured interview. There are six common themes of perception identified and ten common themes emerged as determinants. The result indicated that that Malaysian public servant demonstrates highly positive perception toward the initiative. It is very useful in enhancing public policy towards effective data publishing and sharing management. Subsequently may serve as input to to devise strategies to improve perceptions by addressing the perceptual biases or translating it into actionable policy to promote the success factors onto the non-providing agencies which would escalate the number of providing agencies, and consequently boost the number of data set, and eventually enhance the availability of impactful dataset to support Malaysia Government Data Sharing and Open Science initiatives.