Personanondata: White House Sponsored DataJam Promotes Open Data Initiatives

Commercial publishers of government-funded and/or -produced content and data are spooked by some of these moves by the government. During our meeting it was mentioned that one only needs to search for “aspirin” on Google to see how accessing government-produced content via API can produce content that looks very much like a drug handbook entry from Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer or some other commercial medical publisher. The government often makes reference-like content a requirement of various approval processes, and thus, we may be about to see professional reference content undergo some profound changes. And that is just one small example of what could happen to commercial publishing. As a direct result of the open-data initiatives both in the US and Europe, the Association of American Publishers and Society of Scholarly Publishers (in collaboration with partner CrossRef) have established an initiative named CHORUS. (The EU is said to be about to press for greater open-data requirements than we have in the US.) Through CHORUS, publishers aim to avoid a PubMed situation and manage the open data and open access content requirements themselves; publishers who publish content which is also available on PubMed see significant decreases in traffic once PubMed opens access to the same content. Publishers believe that, by setting up their own open-access service, they will be able to fulfill the government’s open-access requirement and mitigate the impact(s) on their own business models.