Open Knowledge

Last Friday, Barry Eichengreen, professor of Economics and Political Science at Berkeley, wrote about “Open Access Economics” at the prestigious commentary, analysis and opinion page Project Syndicate, where influential professionals, politicians, economists, business leaders and Nobel laureates share opinions about current economic and political issues.

 

He reaffirmed that indeed the results of the Reinhart and Rogoff study were used by some politicians to justify austerity measures taken by governments around the world with stifling public debt.

Our next Open Humanities Hangout will take place next Tuesday, 28th May. This is the latest in the series of regular hangouts we've been organizing over the past few months with people interested in tapping in to the growing amount of open cultural data and content.

What: Open Humanities Hangout looking at opening up historical correspondence and mapping the "letter net" – e.g. did Dickens write to George Eliot and did she write back? Come help us find out! Read more belowWhen: Tuesday 28th May 2013 at 1700 BST, 12:00 EDT, 1800 CETWhere: Online via Google Hangout and IRC – we'll publish the hangout url nearer the timeWho: anyone who loves the humanities and wants to see the great works of our past accessible and re-usable by anyone regardless of background or location.Signup: please sign up here or email sam.leon@okfn.org. Note you can always just drop in on the day but it helps us if we have a sense of numbers!

Twitter network. Their teacher is School of Data “data wrangler” Michael Bauer, whose organization teaches journalists and non-profits basic data skills. At the recent International Journalism Festival, Bauer showed journalists how to analyze Twitter networksusing OpenRefine, Gephi, and the Twitter API.

 

Bauer's route into teaching hacks how to hack data was a circuitous one. He studied medicine and did postdoctoral research on the cardiovascular system, where he discovered his flair for data. Disillusioned with health care, Bauer dropped out to become an activist and hacker and eventually found his way to the School of Data. I asked him about the potential and pitfalls of data analysis for everyone.

At rOpenSci we are creating packages that allow access to data repositories through the R statistical programming environment that is already a familiar part of the workflow of many scientists. We hope that our tools will not only facilitate drawing data into an environment where it can readily be manipulated, but also one in which those analyses and methods can be easily shared, replicated, and extended by other researchers. While all the pieces for connecting researchers with these data sources exist as disparate entities, our efforts will provide a unified framework that will be quickly connect researchers to open data.

Today we are very happy and excited to announce the final release of CKAN 2.0. This is the most significant piece of CKAN news since the project began, and represents months of hectic work by the team and other contributors since before the release of version 1.8 last October, and of the 2.0 beta in February. Thank you to the many CKAN users for your patience – we think you’ll agree it’s been worth the wait.

 

It's never been a more exciting time to be a learner. The Edupunks' Guide was written to be a first-of-its kind resource for the future of education: a comprehensive guide to learning online and charting a personalized path to an affordable credential using the latest innovative tools and organizations. This guide is full of people, programs, and ideas that are part of the future of learning. I've spoken to over 100 learners from programs and sites around the country and around the world that offer new methods of content delivery, new platforms for socialization, and new forms of accreditation. Most of them take advantage of the technology now at our disposal— they're either all-online programs that complement the experiences you're already having; or hybrid programs, combining in-person and online experiences. Nearly all of them are cheaper than your average state university. Many are even free! And I've given you the tools to go out and find even more options, and to create them for yourself.

 

Real-life stories and hands-on advice for today's students, whether you're going back to school, working, transferring colleges, or pursuing lifelong learning goals.

The University of Chicago launched the first secure cloud-based computing system that enables researchers to access and analyze human genomic cancer information without the costly and cumbersome infrastructure normally needed to download and store massive amounts of data.

 

The Bionimbus Protected Data Cloud, as it is called, enables researchers who are authorized by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to access and analyze data in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) without having to set up secure, compliant computing environments capable of managing and analyzing terabytes of data, download the data--which can take weeks--and then install the appropriate tools needed to perform the desired analyses.

 

Using technology that was developed in part by the Open Science Data Cloud, a National Science Foundation-supported project that is developing cloud infrastructure for large scientific datasets, the Bionimbus Protected Data Cloud provides researchers with a more cost- and time-effective mechanism to extract knowledge from massive amounts of data. Drawing insights from big data is imperative for addressing some of today's most vexing environmental, health and safety challenges.

In a comparison that includes the top 10 R&D-spending nations in the world, the Netherlands ranks No. 1 in publication impact per research article*, No. 1 in citations generated per unit of research and development spending, No. 2 in publications generated per unit of R&D spending and No. 1 by level of international collaboration.

Surprising? Yes and no. The Dutch like to see their country as a “knowledge economy,” so they might say they saw this coming. But a top position among R&D heavyweights in key research performance areas? Revealing, to say the least.

Elsevier has built up quite a portfolio of comparative research performance studies over the past few years. The SciVal suite of products, based on Scopus data, has allowed us to create overviews of how well countries such as Japan, Italy, India, the UK and the US are doing in terms of research output, research quality and collaboration. Given the Dutch heritage of our company, however, the obvious question remained: where does this leave the Netherlands?

As part of the progressive erosion of RCUK’s initially excellent open-access policy, barrier-based publishers somehow got them to accept their “open-access decision tree“, which you can now find on page 7 of the toothless current version of the policy. The purpose of this manoeuvre by the Publishers Association is to lend an air of legitimacy to continuing to deny citizens access to the research they funded for up to 24 months after publication. It’s to the House of Lords’ enduring shamethat they swallowed this, when they must know that there is no justification for embargoes of any length.

More recently, as commentary on the Australian Research Council’s open access policy, the Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG) published its own rather better decision tree.

But it still doesn’t go nearly far enough. So here is the SV-POW! decision tree, which we encourage you to print out and hang on your office door.

The Global Roads Open Access Data Set, Version 1 (gROADSv1) was developed under the auspices of the CODATA Global Roads Data Development Task Group. The data set combines the best available roads data by country into a global roads coverage, using the UN Spatial Data Infrastructure Transport (UNSDI-T) version 2 as a common data model. All country road networks have been joined topologically at the borders, and many countries have been edited for internal topology. Source data for each country are provided in the documentation, and users are encouraged to refer to the readme file for use constraints that apply to a small number of countries. Because the data are compiled from multiple sources, the date range for road network representations ranges from the 1980s to 2010 depending on the country (most countries have no confirmed date), and spatial accuracy varies. The baseline global data set was compiled by the Information Technology Outreach Services (ITOS) of the University of Georgia. Updated data for 27 countries and 6 smaller geographic entities were assembled by Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), with a focus largely on developing countries with the poorest data coverage.

As David Cameron prepares for the UK’s presidency of the G8, the issue of supply chain transparency is already gaining considerable momentum, driven largely by high profile supply chain disasters and scandals. Even UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has called for companies to take responsibility for their supply chains in a comment reacting to the recent Bangladeshi garment factory collapse.

 

It is interesting to note that there are some businesses that claim to have product traceability in their supply chains but more often than not this tends to be about electronic label tracking rather than actual understanding of supplier sustainability. More businesses need to take this issue seriously.

 

However, understanding suppliers, their ability to be consistently responsible and to ensure they are running their businesses efficiently and not passing on unnecessary cost and risk to customers can be a difficult and costly process. So what role can open data have in helping businesses get to grips with suppliers and suppliers’ suppliers?

The final draft of the Data Catalogue Vocabulary Application Profile for data portals in Europe(DCAT-AP) is open for public review until 10 June 2013.

DCAT-AP is a specification based on DCAT for describing public sector datasets in Europe. Its basic use case is to enable a cross-data portal search for data sets and make public sector data better searchable across borders and sectors. This can be achieved by the exchange of descriptions of data sets among data portals.

You can find the draft and leave your comments (register and log-in) on the following page:https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/node/66194. All issues will be discussed by the DCAT Application Profile Working Group, in the Virtual Meeting which will take place on 12 June 2013.

Governments are used to being the authoritative source of data and access to the data is typically (heavily) regulated. When one starts to talk about opening up data with governments, many alarms go off: privacy, security, confidentiality, loss of control, and quality among others. I find there are a strong sense of ownership and a fear of opening up - probably due to all these concerns.

Furthermore, it is often not within the formal mission of a government ministry, agency or department to provide access to data. That is why open data can often be seen as a distant, not interesting and not easily understandable problem.

Breaking down such resistance can be done via top-down mandate (as has happened in several cases) but, whilst top-down support is clearly useful, it is not enough. A successful shift in culture needs to be built at all levels of government, and this needs time, sensitivity, respect and, frankly savoir faire.

Governments must understand that placing information on the Web solely as an informative resource, although important and required by policies in many cases, is not enough anymore. Citizens and civil societies are asking for access to the raw data so that they can use it in new and valuable ways.

“Inevitably, there will be questions about what we are each prepared to sign up to,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron in January, in his letter to his fellow G8 leaders. For months later, Russia has made clear it clear what it wasn’t willing to sign onto: the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The most recent update on Russia is that the Kremlin will be pursuing “open government” on its own terms. Russia has withdrawn the letter of intent that it submitted on April 2012 in Brazil, at the first annual meeting of the Open Government Partnership.

At Tacoma Community College (TCC) in Washington, faculty and staff noticed a trend: fewer students were purchasing the required textbooks for classes.

 

Instead, students were checking out related materials from the library and trying to recreate information on their own. The students couldn’t afford the hefty textbook costs, and it was affecting classroom performance.

“It hurts their engagement in the classroom, it hurts their ability to stay in school and it leaves them at a bigger disadvantage than they are at already,” said Quill West, open educational resources (OER) project director at TCC.

 

The college, with the cooperation of faculty and students, made a move toward using OERs. The two-year project began in April 2012 and is supported by student technology fees. The goal was to embed OERs into the 10 classes with the highest enrollments and to save students $250,000.

A year later, 39 sections of 19 individual classes—from biology, to English, to computer courses—use digital materials rather than traditional textbooks. Faculty isn’t required to participate, but the number of teachers using OERs is growing. To date, the college has saved students $266,000.

Open Science is a movement that aims to make research results more rapidly accessible, reusable and transparent for everybody all around the world. Based on the new information and communication technologies, Open Science conduces researchers to work in a collaborative environment to speed scientific discoveries.

JournalTOCs is the biggest searchable collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs). It contains articles' metadata of TOCs for over 22,099 journals directly collected from over 1793 publishers.

 

JournalTOCs has taken special care to include all the highest rated journals in their fields, guaranteeing quality results. See Selection Criteria.

 

JournalTOCs pulls together a database of Table of Contents (TOCs) from scholarly journals and provides a convenient single "one stop shop" interface to these TOCs.

 

JournalTOCs is an initiative of the ICBL at Heriot-Watt University. It was created in 2009 with funding from the JISC Rapid Innovation Grants.

Open Access (OA) is free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, webwide.

There are two roads to OA:

 

(1) the "golden road" of OA journal-publishing , where journals provide OA to their articles (either by charging the author-institution for refereeing/publishing outgoing articles instead of charging the user-institution for accessing incoming articles, or by simply making their online edition free for all); 

(2) the "green road" of OA self-archiving, where authors provide OA to their own published articles, by making their own eprints free for all.

The two roads to OA should not be confused or conflated; they are complementary. (This site is focussed largely on the green road, because it is the fastest and surest way to reach immediate 100% OA; but the green road might eventually lead to gold too.)

OA self-archiving is not self-publishing; nor is it about online publishing without quality control (peer review); nor is it intended for writings for which the author wishes to be paid, such as books or magazine/newspaper articles. OA self-archiving is for peer-reviewed research, written solely for research impact rather than royalty revenue.

Yesterday, May 9, 2013, the U.S. government issued an executive order and an open data policy mandating that federal agencies collect and publish new datasets in open, machine-readable, and, whenever possible, non-proprietary formats.  The new policy gives agencies six months to create an inventory of all the government-produced datasets they collect and maintain; a list of datasets that are publicly accessible; and an online system to collect feedback from the public as to how they would like to use the data.  The goals are twofold — greater access to government data for the public, and the availability of data in forms that businesses and researchers can better use.  This builds on the earlier White House Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government.

 

These documents were accompanied by a link to something that actually caught my fancy even more – a greatly expanded Project Open Data Github repository for guidelines, use cases and tools.  This, alongside the ever-growing (and soon to be extensively updated) data.gov, are evidence of real efforts to release more data and make it truly useful and usable.

Scientists’ work follows a consistent pattern. They apply for grants, perform their research, and publish the results in a journal. The process is so routine it almost seems inevitable. But what if it’s not the best way to do science? 

Although the act of publishing seems to entail sharing your research with the world, most published papers sit behind paywalls. The journals that publish them charge thousands of dollars per subscription, putting access out of reach to all but the most minted universities. Subscription costs have risen dramatically over the past generation. According to critics of the publishers, those increases are the result of the consolidation of journals by private companies who unduly profit off their market share of scientific knowledge.

When we investigated these alleged scrooges of the science world, we discovered that, for their opponents, the battle against this parasitic profiting is only one part of the scientific process that needs to be fixed. 

Advocates of “open science” argue that the current model of science, developed in the 1600s, needs to change and take full advantage of the Internet to share research and collaborate in the discovery making process. When the entire scientific community can connect instantly online, they argue, there is simply no reason for research teams to work in silos and share their findings according to the publishing schedules of journals. 

Subscriptions limit access to scientific knowledge. And when careers are made and tenures earned by publishing in prestigious journals, then sharing datasets, collaborating with other scientists, and crowdsourcing difficult problems are all disincentivized. Following 17th century practices, open science advocates insist, limits the progress of science in the 21st.

The supply chain is not the sexiest subject when it comes to important technologies, but like many industries the less sexy the business the more important its relevance.

Speaking of less sexy, David Cameron alluded to the supply chain when he revealed at Davos that the UK presidency of G8 will focus on greater business transparency and the way that open data can boost the UK economy.

Big data and open data are subjects that people take very seriously and many see them as a perfect storm where they are conjoined to create a perfect storm of driving transparency and savings throughout the supply chain.

By connecting data, businesses can see a tangible benefit - reduced costs through energy savings passed down through the supply chain, reduced reputational risk and improved relations due to confidence in business continuity.

At the recent Teradata University conference in Copenhagen, a stream of presenters from Google, eBay, Tesco, Chelsea Football Club, Groupon, LinkedIn and many others outlined this in great detail.

In recent years, data visualizations and infographics have become a common way to relay news and information - an addition or sometimes a replacement for the traditional written narrative.

The folks at The New School's PETLab, though, want to take storytelling a step further, by creating a new approach to expressing the news.

Enter Data Toys, a Knight-funded prototype, which allow people to play with information as a way to reveal the complex systems underlying news and trends. The toys also offer ways to help readers make sense of large data sets or changes in data over time.

We recently asked the Data Toys team, Colleen Macklin, John Sharp and Heather Chaplin, what kinds of toys they’re building and what the implications are for how people consume news and information.