I had the distinct pleasure of moderating the opening plenary session of the Joint Annual Meeting of COSA, NAGARA and SAA in Washington D.C. in early August. The panel was on the “state of access,” and I shared the dais with David Cuillier, an Associate Professor and Director of the University of Arizona School of […]
Category: open data
Impact Round-Up 9th August: Research recommendations, open data outcomes, and keeping open access simple.
Managing Editor Sierra Williams presents a round-up of popular stories from around the web on higher education, academic impact, and trends in scholarly communication. Jennifer Lin at PLOS announced an exciting new recommendations feature to be implemented across the PLOS journals in Diving into the haystack to make more hay? at the PLOS Tech Blog. Linking up with figshare, the Related Content tab on […]
The untapped potential of digital citizen engagement in Morocco: a data-driven approach to online participation.
Aligning closely with trends in research impact, open government approaches are looking to incorporate public engagement and establish wider transparency as central operations. Samuel Lee, Fabian Seiderer and Lida Bteddini share findings from a World Bank project on digital participation and open data in Morocco. They find that greater access and use of public sector data can result in increased civic participation and socio-economic benefits. […]
On Taxis and Rainbow Tables: Lessons for researchers and governments from NYC’s improperly anonymized taxi logs.
When New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission made publicly available 20GB worth of trip and fare logs, many welcomed the vast trove of open data. Unfortunately, prior to being widely shared, the personally identifiable information had not been anonymized properly. Vijay Pandurangan describes the structure of the data, what went wrong with its release, how easy it is to de-anonymize certain […]
The Outing of the Medical Profession: Data marathons to open clinical research gates to frontline service providers.
Could greater data transparency across the medical field solve the problem of unreliable evidence? Dr. Leo Anthony Celi charts the efforts to improve the publicly available MIMIC database, a creation of the public-private partnership between MIT, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Philips Health-Care, through a series of data marathons. Data scientists, nurses, clinicians and doctors are coming together to collaborate and answer clinically relevant […]
Fostering open science
Training for EC project officers on open access and open data in Horizon 2020
We ran four half-day workshops at the end of June as part of the FOSTER project. FOSTER aims to facilitate open science by training researchers about open access a…
The Philosophy of Data Science (series) – Rob Kitchin: “Big data should complement small data, not replace them.”
Over the coming weeks we will be featuring a series of interviews conducted by Mark Carrigan on the nature of ‘big data’ and the opportunities and challenges presented for scholarship with its growing influence. In this first interview, Rob Kitchin elaborates on the specific characteristics of big data, the hype and hubris surrounding its advent, and the distinction between data-driven science and empiricism. What […]
All that Big Data Is Not Going to Manage Itself: Part One
On February 26, 2003 the National Institutes of Health released the “Final NIH Statement on Sharing Research Data.” As you’ll be reminded when you visit that link, 2003 was eons ago in “internet time.” Yet the vision NIH had for the expanded sharing of research data couldn’t have been more prescient. As the Open Government […]
Thomas Piketty’s Capital changed the global discussion about inequality because of its great data – now make it open.
The rich data informing Thomas Piketty’s landmark research in Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been instrumental to its success. Ulrich Atz argues it is highly commendable that Piketty has made attempts to share the data files. But none of this data is explicitly open for reuse and fails to be available in machine-readable formats. Without an open licence it is not clear whether […]
Feedback Wanted: Publishers & Data Access
This post is co-authored with Jennifer Lin, PLOS Short Version: We need your help! We have generated a set of recommendations for publishers to help increase access to data in partnership with libraries, funders, information technologists, and other stakeholders. Please read and comment on the report (Google Doc), and help us to identify concrete action items for each of the recommendations […]