Transitions

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2009.

By Paul Basken

Data overload is creeping up on everyone, and research scientists are no exception. So it’s time, according to a report out today from the federally chartered National Academies, to think about what to do with all that data.

The report, “Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age,” calls on researchers, their universities, and publishers of academic journals to consider new policies for compiling, tracking, storing, and sharing data. Otherwise, the report says, the flood of data coming out of scientific research could be lost, misinterpreted, or misused.

As an example, the report’s authors—more than three dozen experts, mostly at research universities—suggest that scientists try harder to think of what data are relevant to their findings and then include that data in their published work.

Read on…

Declan Butler, Publish in Wikipedia or Perish, Nature News, Dec. 18, 2008

Journal to require authors to post in the free online encyclopaedia.

Excerpt:

Wikipedia, meet RNA. Anyone submitting to a section of the journalRNA Biology will, in the future, be required to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia.

The initiative is a collaboration between the journal and the RNA family database (Rfam) consortium led by the UK Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton. “The novelty is that for the first time it creates a link between Wikipedia and traditional journal publishing, with its peer-review element,” says Alex Bateman, who co-heads the Rfam database. The aim, Bateman says, is to boost the quality of the scientific content on Wikipedia while using the entries to update the Sanger database.

…The goal is to encourage more scientists who work on RNA to get involved in creating and updating public data on RNA families, while being rewarded by the traditional method of a citable publication, says Sean Eddy, a computational biologist at the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia, and a co-author of the nematode article.

Lawrence Liang, Free/Open Source Software, Open Content, United Nations Development Programme, 2007. Under a CC-BY license. Excerpt:

…The Open Content model of knowledge creation and dissemination has emerged as a significant way in which we can move beyond the barriers of restrictive licensing. At the same time, it enables us to rethink our relationship to the world of knowledge and cultural production. Inspired by the Free Software movement, Open Content seeks to move away from the traditional user/producer binary in favour of a more participative process of knowledge creation and usage.

This e-Primer introduces the idea of Open Content by locating it within the larger historical context of copyright’s relation to the public domain. It examines the foundational premises of copyright and argues that a number of these premises have to be tested on the basis of the public interest that they purport to serve. It then looks at the ways in which content owners are increasingly using copyright as a tool to create monopolies, and how an alternative paradigm like Open Content can facilitate a democratization of knowledge and culture….

The argument of this e-Primer will be that policy makers across the world, and particularly in developing countries, should take note of the advantages of the Open Content paradigm as a way of overcoming barriers which restrict access to information, knowledge and culture. There are also significant economic advantages for developing countries which shall be detailed, for instance in relation to the cost of learning materials….

We…use the phrase ‘Open Content’ to primarily refer to content that provides the greatest freedom (the right to modify), since other kinds of content which do not provide the right to modify may actually be covered by the Open Access movement….

Some of the key areas for policy makers to consider include:

* Open Content policy to enable access to publicly funded research;
* Access to primary material such as research data;
* Financial, technological and other support for Open Access and Content repositories; and
* Support for publications based on Open Content resources….

It is also important to note that the problem does not merely lie with government policies but also with educational institutions, which are supported – either in full or in part – by public funding….In other words, there is a serious and urgent need for all public institutions to examine the public availability of the knowledge that they produce, and the most effective strategies for further dissemination. For the reasons already outlined in this e-Primer, it would make immense sense for them to start moving towards an Open Content/Open Access paradigm….

Organized by the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U.S.A., Pleiades brings together a global community of scholars, students and enthusiasts to expand and enhance continually the information originally brought together by the Classical Atlas Project (1988-2000) to support the publication of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (R.J.A. Talbert, ed., Princeton, 2000). Pleiades is an international research network and associated web portal and content management system (CMS) devoted to the study of ancient geography.

Last month they released the first batch of their data, and what a great job they’re doing. The material is impeccably laid out, in particular:

* They’ve ensured there’s a proper open license on each collection of material (in this case a CC Attribution license)
* They’ve made the material available in bulk as well as through a search facility

More information about the datasets available as well as links can be found on the Pleiades site. This really is a perfect example of what an open knowledge project can be and so a big well done to the pleiades team for the work so far (and long may it continue!).

Open Access News, Nov. 15, 2007