Open data

There has been a lot of talk about open data as of late (see the Panton Principles, Kevin Smith’s blog post “What is Open Data”, and Michael Gurstein’s blog posts here and here). I’ve also recently read about numerous open data projects/initiatives through the Connotea open access tracking project (developed by Peter Suber), including the Hawaii Open Data Project, DataSF, and the World Bank, to name a few. Much of these projects involve governmental and organisational data, which seems to be transitioning to open with little trouble.

Data produced in the academic environment, alternatively, still has a way to go. Discussions at the Publishing primary research data breakout session at Science Online London demonstrated that academics still have concerns about data source citing and how credit is given, and would like to see the publication of data recognised as an “academic contribution”, aka equivalent to the publication of a journal article. Fortunately work is being done by JISC (Managing Research Data Programme) and the British Library (DataCite) to support academics in this area. It will be interesting to see how things continue to develop in this area.

Image credit: Chris Campbell

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