New Efforts Promote Open Data in Science and Medicine - Techonomy

"One recent effort came from a broad group of stakeholders from publishers, government agencies, academia, and industry to establish new guidelines that would make it easier for scientists to access and use each other’s data. The FAIR Data Principles (that stands for findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) were the foundation of a hackathon last month that encouraged participants to evaluate and improve their own data for broader use. The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, launched in 2013 by dozens of institutions, has a focus on improving data standards and interoperability to make information more useful when it is shared. And just this month, scientists from the University of Washington and Microsoft released a text-mining tool that looks through big repositories for data sets that should have been released publicly but weren’t (often because scientists forget to change settings when it’s time for a private data set to be shared). In the paper describing this work, the team reports that using the approach 'spurred administrators to respond,' sharing 400 data sets in a single week."