Save the date: Workshop “Open data, restricted data and the role of libraries”

NEREUS – a network of European libraries in Economics and Social Sciences –  is happy to announce a pre-conference workshop (2015-6-23 in London) at this year’s LIBER-Conference.

Open Science and open data have become hot topics in recent years. Effective research data management is more and more postulated by research funders. Research infrastructure providers worldwide are busy building up various services and tools for researchers to support them within their research and the management of research data. But how successful are these approaches and their impact in supporting research? How open could or should data be and which role(s) libraries can play to support researchers effectively? Read the rest of this entry »

Discussion: “It’s the Neoliberalism, Stupid: Why instrumentalist arguments for Open Access, Open Data, and Open Science are not enough.”

The following blog post is an interesting point of view in the discussion on open science. It originally appeared on Digging Digitally and is reposted under a CC-BY license.
Feel free to comment!

The Open Movement has made impressive strides in the past year, but do these strides stand for reform or are they just symptomatic of the further expansion and entrenchment of neoliberalism? Eric Kansa argues that it is time for the movement to broaden its long-term strategy to tackle the needs for wider reform in the financing and organization of research and education and oppose the all-pervasive trend of universities primarily serving the needs of commerce.  Read the rest of this entry »

European Commission held public Consultation on Open Research Data

The European Commission (EC) held a public consultation on open research data. For that purpose the Commission invited stakeholders from various branches and researchers, the industry, funders, libraries, publishers, infrastructure developers and other stakeholders joined the meeting on 2 July in Brussels.

The commission posed five questions to structure the debate. These questions included basic questions like “how research data can be defined?”. But a lion’s share of the questions dealt with the “openness” of data: What types of data should be openly available? When and how does openness need to be limited?

In addition other important questions from the perspective of infrastructure service providers were mentioned. How should research data be stored and made accessible? How should the issue of data re-use be addressed? And finally a question I personally characterize as a very important topic: How can we enhance data awareness and a culture of data sharing?

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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 »

US: “Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research” – new White House Directive mandates OA

John Paul Holdren, a chief advisor of US-President Obama on science and technology issues, has issued a memorandum  that directs those agencies with more than $100 million in research and development expeditures…

“…to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication.”

According to Holdren the directive is well-balanced:

“We wanted to strike the balance between the extraordinary public benefit of increasing public access to the results of federally-funded scientific research and the need to ensure that the valuable contributions that the scientific publishing industry provides are not lost.”

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Found on the ‘net: OpenAIRE, OA in Economics and Benefits of Open Data

Today I want to point the attention of our readers to some actual developments, articles and blog posts. Actually, there are too many interesting topics to be addressed in single posts. Therefore I collected some facts in a buildup.

Open AIRE releases demonstrators for enhanced publications

The OpenAIRE initiative (www.openaire.eu) has recently released demonstrators for enhanced publications. These focus on linking literature to associated research data and project information in two different disciplines: life sciences and social sciences.

The pilots are ‘work in progress’, but Open AIRE warmly welcomes feedback at this stage from researchers, open science enthusiasts, librarians and all on how the initiative can improve and develop these pilots further, especially from the researcher’s point of view.

The demonstrators are available here: https://www.openaire.eu/en/component/content/article/9-news-events/424-subject-specific-pilots-for-enhanced-publications

To get in touch with Open AIRE directly with any questions, feel free to write an Email to najla.rettberg [at] sub.uni-goettingen.de.

Ross Mounce: Review of Open Access in Economics

Ross Mounce, a PhD student at the University of Bath, wrote an interesting blog post about the development of open access publishing in economics. Ross states that 17% of the overall literature space (1.66 million articles) in 2011 were published open access. This is a comparatively good result. Nevertheless the remaining 83% of all articles are still published closed access. Read the rest of this entry »

EC-Survey on Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Open Science matters!

These days, the European Commission has just published the results of a consultation regarding accessibility and preservation of digital publications and research data in the European Union.

Commissioner Neelie Kroes, responsible for the digital agenda for Europe, has launched this consultation in July 2011 for seeking views on access to and preservation of digital scientific information – to be more precisely, the survey broached the issues of Open Access for scientific publications, accessibility of research data and digital long term preservation.

The purpose of the consultation was to gather information from as many sources as possible and receive important input for the future development of policy options in the area of scientific information in the digital age.

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Linking and lightening: LabArchives and BioMed Central create a new platform for publishing scientific data

Sharing and reuse of data has become a vital part of modern scientific research. Having access to datasets ensures that the pace of scientific discovery is not unnecessarily hindered by data being kept under lock and key or hidden away in lab drawers.

In this context I read some interesting news: As part of the commitment to reproducible research and transparency, BioMed Central has now partnered with LabArchives to work together for the shared goal of making datasets supporting peer-reviewed publications available and permanently linked to online publications – and available under terms which permit reuse freely, as Open Data.

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Open Economics Workgroup provides information and data sets

Since spring 2011 the Open Economics Workgroup is active in the UK and beyond. The workgroup is run by the Open Knowledge Foundation in association with the Centre for Intellectual and Property Law (CIPIL) at the University of Cambridge.

The members of the working group consist of leading academics and researchers, public and private sector economists, representatives from national and international public bodies and other experts from around the world.

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Berlin publishes strategy for Open Data of the public administration

On Friday, Stefan Krempl wrote an article for heise.de about the new strategy of the Senate of Berlin to extend its Open Data Portal. Open Data Berlin is the first open data project in Germany for the public administration. In the UK this is much more common and already a regular service.

In Berlin, the Senate published a strategy document in cooperation with the Fraunhofer-Institute FOCUS, where the future of the project is designed – including demands for better organizational structures, coherent metadata schema and useful applications.

In the medium term, all enactments and protocols -if not classified as confidential- should be made available to the public on the platform. 
In their paper, Fraunhofer proposes to publish these documents in open formats only – a useful attempt especially when we’re thinking about the long-term preservation of these data. 
Beside  textual documents, datasets of the public administration and applications are also published.

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Incentives for Data Sharing: £8.000 a year for promoting open data!

When I first heard, that the Panton Fellowships offer the possibility to get £8.000 bucks in a year for making scientific data open, I thought this was a joke. Some kind of an idea that might only cause windfall gains by scientists needing a funding budget. But it is worth taking a deeper look:

The Panton Fellowships are funded by the Open Society Foundations. The coordination is done by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Fellowshops will be awarded to scientists who actively promote open data in science.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Social Life of Data

Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford, addresses in his blogpost some interesting questions and positions related to open data:

First he states that access to and use of data may be shaped as much by social conventions as by available technology.

He quotes a report published by NESTA and RIN to illustrate what he means:

“Cultures vary in different disciplines, which can itself cause difficulties in cross-disciplinary work; but researchers are typically both co-operative and competitive. The key currency for securing competitive career rewards is publication of articles, conference papers and monographs; and many researchers regard the data and other resources that they create in the course of their research as their intellectual capital which they wish to exploit and mine in order to produce new publications over an extended period. Some researchers fear that openness involves a loss of control, and a risk of being scooped by others”.

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