Information Today, Inc. Corporate Site KMWorld CRM Media Streaming Media Faulkner Speech Technology Unisphere/DBTA
PRIVACY/COOKIES POLICY
Other ITI Websites
American Library Directory Boardwalk Empire Database Trends and Applications DestinationCRM Faulkner Information Services Fulltext Sources Online InfoToday Europe KMWorld Literary Market Place Plexus Publishing Smart Customer Service Speech Technology Streaming Media Streaming Media Europe Streaming Media Producer Unisphere Research



News & Events > NewsBreaks
Back Index Forward
Threads bluesky LinkedIn FaceBook Instagram RSS Feed
 



Open Access and Open Data Roundup
by
Posted On April 5, 2016
March was another busy month for stakeholders in the ever-expanding world of open access (OA) and its sibling, open data. During the past few weeks, we’ve seen a small step forward for FASTR, an important piece of proposed U.S. legislation. Open Data had an equally busy month, with several calls-to-action for support and advocacy and the splashy launch of the new Open Data Button. Although NewsBreaks periodically covers important news happening within the OA world, this article marks an important milestone: It’s the first time open data has been featured so prominently within an OA roundup.

FASTR Moves to the Senate Floor

The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act of 2015 (S 779 and HR 1477) slowly continues forward. On March 8, FASTR moved out of committee and was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar.

If passed, FASTR would require all federal agencies that spend more than $100 million on grant-funded research to develop public access policies and would require that published research become free-to-access after a maximum 12-month embargo period. FASTR is not technically an OA mandate, because it does not require research to be reusable via an open license. Furthermore, the 12-month embargo period has frustrated many OA advocates. Regardless, free access after 12 months is a big step—and a vast improvement over no public access.

FASTR may sound awfully similar to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo that just celebrated its third anniversary—and it should. FASTR is indeed consistent with the policy put forth by the OSTP. But Elliot Harmon from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) explains in a blog post, “[T]he new Senate version of FASTR doesn’t break much new ground beyond what the White House memo currently requires. On the other hand, a new administration is just around the corner. Codifying the open access mandate in law will ensure that future administrations make publicly funded research available to the public.”

Open Data Day

On March 5, 200-plus Open Data Day events of all sizes were held around the world to celebrate open data, and, more importantly, to put open data into practice. According to its website, “Open Data Day is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption of open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.”

The events generally have a grassroots feel to them, similar to those during Open Access Week, and are locally sponsored and loosely connected to each other. But some of the events are bigger and more formally organized and have corporate sponsors—Open Data Day DC 2016 had more than 150 participants and several sponsors, such as Socrata, Fastcase, the Sunlight Foundation, and Amazon Web Services.

Overall, Open Data Day is gaining steam and participants each year. A crowdsourced list of Open Data Day events is available as a Google Spreadsheet, which features links to write-ups of several events. The list includes an Open Inspiration Data Day (Barcelona, Spain), a workshop on open data and data journalists (Asunción, Paraguay), an Open Data for Agriculture app demo and Open Data for Civic Experience gathering (Akure, Nigeria), an inaugural Open Data Day coffee meet-up (Doha, Qatar), and continued work to translate the Open Data Handbook into Vietnamese (Hanoi, Vietnam).

The folks behind the Open Data Day website, a team sponsored by Open Knowledge, issued a humorous call to arms for librarians to get involved: “I heard you folks like books and eat catalogs of data for breakfast. You beautiful people are going to scour the earth for interesting data, help the rest of us figure out what’s important, and generally be useful.”

Open Data Button

In conjunction with Open Data Day, the Open Data Button launched in beta. Led by David Carroll, Joe McArthur, and Georgina Taylor, the team behind the Open Access Button developed this new companion tool.

The Open Access Button was designed to help connect potential readers with research articles locked up behind paywalls. The Open Data Button follows a similar model, although most data is inaccessible because it is unpublished and languishing on researchers’ hard drives rather than publicly and openly shared via open repositories. The Open Data Button is designed to encourage, incentivize, and facilitate sharing data and directly connect researchers and others who are interested in accessing data to data owners.

Using the Open Data Button is quite straightforward. The About page states, “When you need the data supporting a paper (even if it’s behind a paywall), push the Button. If the data has already been made available through the Open Data Button, we’ll give you a link. If it hasn’t, you’ll be able to start a request for the data. [Eventually,] we want to search a variety of other sources for it—but can’t yet.”

Next, once the Button receives a request for a dataset:

The request will be sent to the author. We know sharing data can be hard and there’s sometimes good reasons not to. The author will be able to respond to it by saying how long it’ll take to share the data—or if they can’t. If the data is already available, the author can simply share a URL to the dataset. If it isn’t, they can attach files to a response for us to make available. Files shared with us will be deposited in the Open Science Framework for identification and archiving. The Open Science Framework supports data sharing for all disciplines. As much metadata as possible will be obtained from the paper, the rest we’ll ask the author for.

Although the Open Data Button launched in beta form, users are able to download and install it via the Chrome Web Store. A Firefox version is still under development.

Development funding for the Open Data Button was provided by the Center for Open Science, the Open Society Foundations, and individuals’ donations.


Abby Clobridge is the founder of and principal consultant at FireOak Strategies (formerly Clobridge Consulting), a boutique firm specializing in knowledge management, information management, and open knowledge (open access, open data, open education). Abby has worked with a wide range of organizations throughout the world, including various United Nations agencies; private sector companies; colleges and research universities; nonprofit, intergovernmental, and multi-stakeholder organizations; and the news media. She can be found on Twitter (@aclobridge).

Email Abby Clobridge

Related Articles

5/4/2021Open Access Button Rebrands as OA.Works
9/29/2020Sunlight Foundation Shuts Down
2/25/2020White House Controversy Over Access to Publicly Funded Research
11/7/2019Open Access Button Introduces InstantILL in Beta
3/19/2019Gov404 Tracks Changes to Federal Government Websites
10/11/2018EFF Urges Public to Contact Senators About Register of Copyrights Bill
1/25/2018Open Data Day 2018 Is Planned for March 3
8/3/2017APA and Center for Open Science Make Psychology Research More Open
10/27/2016figshare Releases Report on Open Data
7/5/2016U.S. Open Data Declares Victory and Shutters
6/14/2016Recent Innovations in Open Government
3/22/2016SPECIAL REPORT: Open Data Day
8/11/2015OA Roundup: FASTR Moves Forward; New Controlled Vocabulary Supports Repositories
1/6/2015Open Access 2014: 4Q News Roundup
12/2/2014OpenCon: Students and Early-Career Researchers for Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data
1/7/2014Open Access Roundup
12/17/2013What the Open Access Button Means for the Future of Research and Publishing
2/25/2013U.S. Takes Huge Step Forward in Opening Access to Publicly Funded Research


Comments Add A Comment

              Back to top