Big data and open access » Byte

"We examine open access policies and initiatives relating to big data in work package 2 of the Big data roadmap and cross-disciplinarY community for addressing socieTal Externalities (BYTE) project. The BYTE project aims to assist European science and industry in capturing the positive externalities and diminishing the negative externalities associated with big data in order to gain a greater share of the big data market by 2020. Our comprehensive report provides a review of open access initiatives across a number of sectors. We discover the meaning of open access policies and initiatives in the public sector as compared with similar policies and initiatives driven by the private sector. We also explore how effective these policies and initiatives have been, identify barriers associated with open access to big data, and in particular, explore good practices. We evaluate open access initiatives from the public and private sectors in relation to a number of case study areas including ... We reveal that whilst the public sector leads the charge with open access policies relating to big data, we also discover that the accessibility of big data sets is no longer synonymous with only government held or other publicly funded research data, as powerful private sector profiling and data mining technologies are increasingly supporting open access initiatives for commercial purposes. Despite this, open access to big data policies are not yet implemented in the private sector as widely as they have been in the public sector, even though there exists great potential for industry when business models include open access elements, as well as increasing opportunities for cross-sector collaboration. In fact, open access policies can be developed in relation to any types of large data sets to produce a multitude of benefits as seen in the case studies examined in this section ..."