Open Economics Working Group: Many activities in the last weeks

Despite rising temperatures and beginning summer holidays all across Europe, the Open Economics Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation was very active within the last weeks. I would like to single out a few of these activities:

• On June 11-12 the Second Open Economics International Workshop took place. This second of two international workshops funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, aimed at bringing together economists and senior academics, funders, data publishers and data curators in order to discuss the progress made in the field of open data for economics and the still existing challenges. The topics and the programme were very interesting – and so is the recap of the event, written by Velichka Dimitrova, coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group. One of our project partners, Prof. Dr. Gert G. Wagner, chairman of the German Data Forum (RatSWD), also took part and  gave a lecutre on “the culture of data sharing in economics.” Read the rest of this entry »

English translation of the Project synthesis “Framework for an inter-disciplinary research data infrastructure” published

The German project RADIESCHEN / radish (Rahmenbedingungen einer disziplinübergreifenden Forschungsdateninfrastruktur /Framework for an inter-disciplinary research data infrastructure) has published the project’s synthesis in English. The objective of this DFG-funded project was the development of a roadmap and recommendations for a multi-disciplinary research data infrastructure in Germany.

The project team identified requirements for generic components of existing infrastructures and potential for cross-linking of multi-disciplinary components. The resulting analysis is based on a survey of existing and new projects and includes measures for community building. Key aspects of the analysis are the technical components of the infrastructure, the cost model and the investigation of cross-disciplinary topics.

Photo: “Lachdieschen” by dwarslöper / flickr.com. License: CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 DE

Introducing the OJS-Dataverse Integration Project

Today I want to introduce the PKP- Open Journal System / Dataverse Integration Project to our readers, an approach that is in some parts quite similar to our own approach in the field of economics.

Funded by a $1 million Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant, the OJS-DVN project intends to develop a plugin for journals that are using the Open Journal System (OJS), a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), to expand and improve access to research. Read the rest of this entry »

American Economic Association launches Registry for RCTs.

Patrick McNeal reported on openeconomics.net, that the American Economic Association (AEA) has recently launched a registry for randomized controlled trials in economics. Explaing the reasons why the registry has been implemented, the AEA stated:

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are widely used in various fields of economics and other social sciences. As they become more numerous, a central registry on which trials are on-going or complete (or abandoned) becomes important for various reasons: as a source of results for meta-analysis; as a one-stop resource to find out about available survey instruments and data.

Because existing registries are not well suited to the need for social sciences, in April 2012, the AEA executive committee decided to establish such a registry for economics and other social sciences.

Read the rest of this entry »