Our data: free and open-access — Paul Maharg

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-03-26

Summary:

"Recently I was trawling a publisher’s website for a technology article (Springer, since you ask), with no-access pages and tariff barriers all around me, when a cheeky wee popup asked me: [1] Would you use a data collaboration website to share your research data with colleagues? [a] Yes, publicly [b] Yes, but only privately [c] No [d] I don’t have data ... There was a button missing: the response that said: I want to know which data might be shared and under which circumstances. And the other response that would have said: I’m not going to give this information because you’re a commercial publisher and my data is gold-dust to you and in any case I believe free and open access is best for everyone.  And yes that includes the article I’m trying to get to read. Maybe not best practice in constructing item responses…  And of course I can understand why a publisher would want to know about this: it’s a huge potential market for them.  But here’s why we shouldn’t let them have it ... So why shouldn’t publishers do this?  Because we’re handing over our life’s work to them, for their profit not ours.  Because our knowledge should not be locked up in their gated communities but free for all, world-wide.  And because we should be constructing the means for doing this for our own communities.  And we are.  See, for example, the 9th International Digital Curation Conference was held recently in San Francisco.  There, Eleni Castro, a Research Coordinator at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), Harvard University, and Alex Garnett, Public Knowledge Project, Simon Fraser University, spoke about the link up between journal articles and research data — in more detail, the link between the Public Knowledge Project and Harvard’s Dataverse Network Project.[4]  The project team worked on the problem of seamlessly managing the submission, review and publication of data associated with published articles, with the aim of increasing the replicability and the reusability of research data.  They did so by integrating two open-source systems, PKP’s Open Journal Systems, and the Dataverse Network, and providing a workflow to accompany the integration."

Link:

http://paulmaharg.com/2014/03/24/our-data-free-and-open-access/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.pkp oa.dataverse_network oa.ojs oa.data oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.advocacy oa.benefits

Date tagged:

03/26/2014, 08:04

Date published:

03/26/2014, 04:04