EU Guidelines for Open Access

January 13, 2008 in academia, government, policy, R&D by Hugh | Permalink

Peter Suber reports that:

The Scientific Council of the European Research Council has released its Guidelines for Open Access [pdf]…

Here is the text:

  1. Scientific research is generating vast, ever increasing quantities of information, including primary data, data structured and integrated into databases, and scientific publications. In the age of the Internet, free and efficient access to information, including scientific publications and original data, will be the key for sustained progress.
  2. Peer-review is of fundamental importance in ensuring the certification and dissemination of high-quality scientific research. Policies towards access to peer-reviewed scientific publications must guarantee the ability of the system to continue to deliver high-quality certification services based on scientific integrity.
  3. Access to unprocessed data is needed not only for independent verification of results but, more importantly, for secure preservation and fresh analysis and utilisation of the data.
  4. A number of freely accessible repositories and curated databases for publications and data already exist serving researchers in the EU. Over 400 research repositories are run by European research institutions and several fields of scientific research have their own international discipline-specific repositories. These include for example PubMed Central for peer-reviewed publications in the life sciences and medicine, the arXiv Internet preprint archive for physics and mathematics, the DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank nucleotide sequence database and the RSCB-PDB/MSD-EBI/PDBj protein structure database.
  5. With few exceptions, the social sciences & humanities (SSH) do not yet have the benefit of public central repositories for their recent journal publications. The importance of open access to primary data, old manuscripts, collections and archives is even more acute for SSH. In the social sciences many primary or secondary data, such as social survey data and statistical data, exist in the public domain, but usually at national level. In the case of the humanities, open access to primary sources (such as archives, manuscripts and collections) is often hindered by private (or even public or nation-state) ownership which permits access either on a highly selective basis or not at all.

Based on these considerations, and following up on its earlier Statement on Open Access (Appendix 1) the ERC Scientific Council has established the following interim position on open access:

  1. The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication.
  2. The ERC considers essential that primary data – which in the life sciences for example could comprise data such as nucleotide/protein sequences, macromolecular atomic coordinates and anonymized epidemiological data – are deposited to the relevant databases as soon as possible, preferably immediately after publication and in any case not later than 6 months after the date of publication.

The ERC is keenly aware of the desirability to shorten the period between publication and open access beyond the currently accepted standard of 6 months.

Peter has some good analysis.

What is the NRC’s policy on Open Access?

chicago festival of maps

January 10, 2008 in maps by Hugh | Permalink

Here.

geoporn

January 10, 2008 in Art, geo, photo by Hugh | Permalink

nice aerial pic of montreal’s north shore:

montreal's north shore

[via spacingmontreal]

toronto’s language quilt

January 9, 2008 in canada, datasets, maps by Hugh | Permalink

The Toronto Star has a big map of languages spoken in Toronto, using 2006 census data.

Bricoleururbanism.org, a wonderful blog, has digested some of the map images for you, and here is one:

toronto quilt

Via: Spacingmontreal.ca

Makes me think of a good question for schools and universities: why aren’t you guys doing this stuff in your classes and publishing it like crazy? Wouldn’t it be nice if a big chunk of school work was designed to be actually useful to the world, and actually was? And was distributed freely on the net?

Data Portability

January 9, 2008 in Access, campaigns, resources by Tracey | Permalink

I dicovered DataPortability.org from some folks who are disturbed that their data stored in a system such as Facebook are not portable to other systems and that those data can disappear all together.

history’s best charts (according to the economist)

December 30, 2007 in Art, datasets by Hugh | 1 comment

From the economist:

A good graphic can tell a story, bring a lump to the throat, even change policies. Here are three of history’s best…

They chose these 3:

  • Florence Nightingale’s chart of the causes of the deaths of soldiers in the Crimean war
  • Charles Joseph Minard’s chart of Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812
  • William Playfair’s chart of “weekly wages of a good mechanic” and the “price of a quarter of wheat” against monarchs.

death chart

[link…]

energy data and efficiency

December 21, 2007 in datasets by Hugh | Permalink

Dennis D. McDonald on data & energy use:

What kind of culture changes will be needed, I wonder, both for energy utility staff and for customers when customers are able to make a much more direct connection between the devices they use at home and their monthly bill? This change has the potential for making the customer-company relationship more interactive than it is now. This raises some interesting questions:

* Who is going to teach customers how to best manage their energy consumption?
* Will the energy company’s call center staff have to develop a new set of counseling and advice-giving skills?
* What new tools will control room staff need to monitor distribution network performance, and will these tools take into account human-supplied information alongside automatically-supplied data from the grid and its increasing number of sensors?

(via jon udell)

stephenson on transparency

December 21, 2007 in federal government, government by Hugh | Permalink

David Stephenson writes a great piece arguing for freeing government data:

I suspect my presentation today will be the first time many of you have heard of “transparent government.” It is an exciting new way of treating government data that will blossom as Web 2.0 apps, and what I call the Web 2.0 ethos of cooperation, become commonplace.Among other benefits, transparent government can:

* build public confidence in government
* improve the quality of public debate
* improve delivery of government services

and may even reduce the cost of those services.

[more…]

(via jon udell)

“Cause” and “Data” – Artist’s Perspective

December 14, 2007 in Uncategorized by Tracey | Permalink

Found this via Digital Copyright Canada – Terry McBride, NettwerkMusicGroup,

So “Cause” and “Data”, why is this so important to a brand and thus so important to our Artists? In today’s world many fans expect their musical Artists to support causes that reflect what they themselves relate to; view it as supporting a cause through osmosis via the Artist. Such causes can be common things such as fair trade or greening. Or in the case of an Artist like Radiohead, simply a musical style; or State Radio a social stance. In today’s world of instant news and search, the ability of a fan to find out loads of information on an Artist is quite easy, thus the chance to dislike an artist is also easy… Whether we like it or not what you stand for these days is as important as the music for music fans, especially Uber fans. So what causes do you think are key to attracting you to a Musical Artist?

So why is data valuable? Well as in the early days of BDS and Soundscan, data when viewed properly allows one to see patterns of interest that can be monetized in many different ways. Nettwerk in the early days was one of the first companies to correlate data and micro market records on a city-by-city basis. Many Artists such as Sarah and BNL owe their success to such an approach. So looking at Myspace what is valuable data on an Artist page? I, for one, would say that the number of friends is not valuable, yet the number of times a song has been played is. Especially in some cases the second of the four tracks listed. We have found that which ever song is listed first, can actually impact digital track sales. I also think that scanning fan comments can also be valuable as it crowd-sources a general feeling towards the Artist. What other points of Data do you think are key to gleam from something like Myspace? read more …

I spend lots of time looking at science, social science, qualitative data and quantitative data, but had not thought of data form the music scene. Of course there is data, of course it has a purpose, and of course it is critical to the industry!

communia

December 12, 2007 in policy, projects by Hugh | Permalink

New project funded by the EU, Communia, from the about:

The main goal of the COMMUNIA project is to build a network of organisations that shall become the single European point of reference for high-level policy discussion and strategic action on all issues related to the public domain in the digital environment, as well as related topics such as alternative forms of licensing for creative material (including, but not limited to, Creative Commons licenses), open access to scientific publications and research results, management of works whose authors are unknown (i.e. orphan works).

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