European Commission: Open access to research publications reaching ‘tipping point’…but what about the data?

The European Commission (EC) has released a press statement in which the EC claimed that “the global shift towards making research findings available free of charge for readers—so-called ‘open access’ is reaching ‘tipping point’.”

This enthusiastic view of the Commission is based on three studies that that have been funded by the EC:

One study analysed the growth of open access publications, a second evaluated the strategies of funders to enforce open access and the a third addressed open access to scientific data. Read the rest of this entry »

Endorse the Open Economics Principles!

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, the Open Economics Working Group has just finalised the Open Economic Principles. Now it is also possible to endorse these principles online.  In an e-mail the working group announces:

The Open Economics Working Group would like to introduce the Open Economics Principles, a Statement on Openness of Economic Data and Code. A year and a half ago the Open Economics project began with a mission of becoming central point of reference and support for those interested in open economic data. In the process of identifying examples and ongoing barriers for opening up data and code for the economics profession, we saw the need to present a statement on the guiding principles of transparency and accountability in economics that would enable replication and scholarly debate as well as access to knowledge as a public good. Read the rest of this entry »

Metadata for publication-related Data Archives: As much as necessary and as little as posssible

In the course of our project we had to deal with a work package (WP5) in which we had to develop (or at least to choose) a metadata schema capable of describing and labelling publication-related metadata. Today I would like to summarize our approach and some of our thoughts for choosing an appropriate metadata schema.

I already characterised our approach in my talk at the IASSIST 2013 conference, but I would like to describe it more in-depth to start a discussion with researchers and the community, so feel free to comment.

In a first move we evaluated the data and further materials we found in the data archives of economics journals. These types of data we found within the journals’ data archives were seen as functional requirements, because the metadata schema should be capable to describe these data.

We focussed on a schema that should be capable to describe quantitative data – mainly because qualitative approaches are rare in Economics. Read the rest of this entry »