The Hidden Benefits of Open Data – Medium

"Open data is great! Open data can allow for better meta-analyses and follow-up studies, and can provide great opportunities for improving methods (which I’ve been doing quite a bit of lately). Something that really set in recently though, is that open data can be an amazing resource for teaching.

When writing my textbook, I wanted to use real data from published papers in the examples, with the goal being to re-make figures from those papers as the exercises in the book. (More about how I ended up writing a textbook in a later post.) However, I did most of the dataset hunting back in 2011 and 2012, and I was hard pressed to find real data to use. I made it work and found data from a few different subfields of psychology, but it was much more difficult than I would’ve liked. Later on I gave a few workshops and found some better datasets, but things were still difficult. Open data has become much more prominent in the last few years though, at least compared to how things were then. More recently, at Neurohackweek we had a great tutorial on MRI image processing, using open data from the Human Connectome Project [link].

The big realization for me was coming across @openstatslab on Twitter. I think this initiative is amazing."