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 creating 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.

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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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