Data ain’t so “big” without open access

“The open access debate is boring. There are only so many things that can be said about payers and publishers. In fact, from the researcher’s perspective research won’t get much cheaper. They can either pay to read or pay to be published. In the long run publishers stand to make loads of money with or without open access... There is, however, one reason that has me totally sold on the idea of open access: the opportunity to make big data a reality... I am excited by the change because it creates an industry newly capable of building research tools like science has never seen. Traditional copyright licenses restrict API use. Meaning that there is not a single portal from which ALL academic works can be discovered in entirety. This means data can only be piecemeal and incomplete. As computing power and storage capacities increase we are increasingly able to do novel science with data. Nobel Prize ideas are fermenting under the heavy lid publishers have laid on data. I think Edwin Chen, a data scientist at Twitter, might have been chastising publishers and researchers alike when he said, ‘If all I do is collect data without presenting it in a compelling way that inspires…then I’ve only done half my job.’ Open access makes academic big data possible, I know that much. How valuable is the data locked up by publishers?”