Are We at a Tipping Point for Open Data? | The Scholarly Kitchen

"Last month, President Obama showed off his dad-joke skills while announcing the appointment of the first US Chief Data Scientist. The focus of much of the White House’s messaging around this appointment has been on making the government’s own data publicly available. In his ‘memo to the American people’, however, Dr. D.J. Patil talked about acting as a conduit between government, academia and industry. In some ways, this latest move can be seen as a continuation of a US government push toward open data that mirrors efforts in Europe and elsewhere. For a long time, there has been an expectation that researchers share data upon request with other academics but more recently, the trend has been towards making data widely and publicly available. In February 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a memorandum on Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research. While the 2013 statement got a lot of people’s attention, funding agencies have been moving towards open data for over a decade. In 2003, the NIH announced a data sharing policy in which they stated ..."