Open Access News

From Redfearn:

Digital data, when made freely and openly available, can benefit education and research by encouraging others to re-use that data. However, legal, technical and cultural barriers exist to prevent the free sharing of data which might otherwise promote further educational and scientific advances....In these and other research areas, too much data is produced for the original researchers to exploit. New ways are needed to make data available and accessible for others – but this raises cultural and practical issues. Do I want to share the data I went to such pains to collect? How do I make my data available to others in a way that is meaningful to them? If I do some further analysis, how do I record the new results and ensure they are identified as separate from other results or from the raw data? eBank is a JISC-funded project that is addressing some of these issues for a branch of chemistry....SPECTRa is developing open source automated tools for identifying, extracting and archiving high-volume data, initially in chemistry but with applicability to other sciences. Claddier is achieving similar aims in the environmental sciences by linking publications held in institutional repositories with data at the British Atmospheric Data Centre. This is becoming more pressing as digital repositories become established in universities....There are considerable benefits to having both research papers (e-prints) and the data which support those papers openly available, not least because they can then be linked in ways which are not necessarily possible with printed journals....[Some OA data issues] are subject specific. Many social scientists, for example, want links from data to published articles, rather than the other way round, to see what research has been done on that data. StORe is investigating the different requirements of six subject areas to ensure that the automated tools developed for linking data with journal articles meet users’ needs. Another major issue concerns safeguarding the intellectual property rights associated with data derived from original raw data. GRADE is investigating this issue for the re-use of geospatial data, such as data collected from mapping surveys and remote sensing by satellite.

From Slingo:

Joanna has done some work on the biology of seawater off the coast of Cornwall....On completing her analysis, she publishes a paper that cites [her] datasets and lodges the paper in her institutional repository. She also deposits her datasets in appropriate data repositories like the Southampton Oceanography Centre data archive, and the British Oceanographic Data Centre. The archives holding the datasets and publications she cites are notified that a paper citing them has been submitted, and the information about those datasets and publications is updated to reflect the citations. Links are established between the records held in the publication repository and in the data archives. It turns out that Joanna’s work can be used to help calibrate a global earth system model. Fred, at Reading University, finds Joanna’s paper and data, either via citations or directly from publication repositories. As part of his work he checks back through the other datasets cited as inputs to Joanna’s data because, before he uses her data, he suspects her work could be recalibrated by using later, better quality, meteorological re-analyses. Meanwhile Joanna, and all the dataset authors, will be pleased that the citation of not only the publication, but also the datasets, will be reflected in the 2012 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).