Science 2.0: Yelp Frees Its Data, Let's Follow Suit
abernard102@gmail.com 2014-07-30
Summary:
"Yelp, a local business review site, has released an updated API which increases the number of data calls to 25,000 per day, a big switch from an earlier 100 cap.
And it's free. Why the change of heart? They have been burned in the past, notably by Google, which used Yelp review content without attributing it. but they seem to no longer be afraid a competitor will scrape its data and grow larger.
Open data is a fundamental tenet of Science 2.0, of course. And journals have somewhat sporadically begun to require but not require data. The same week that I wrote about peer review in the Wall Street Journal and lauded the Public Library of Science for requiring data they violated their own policy, seemingly because the editor liked the message the paper was sending. For social science papers, that kind of open access editorial review is fine but for science we need real peer review and that means data ..."