Walking the walk: how the scientific community is embracing open data : Naturejobs Blog

"The 2017 Better Science through Better Data event in London, UK, hosted by Springer Nature and Wellcome, was a full day exposé of emerging open data practices, tools, strategies, and policies. Among the potential benefits of open data are replicability, reproducibility, and reusability. While open data is a relatively new hype, some evidence suggests that open data does indeed increase reproducibility. The 2017 State of Open Data Report, handed out to every attendant at the event, states: “Open data is like a renewable energy source: it can be reused without diminishing its original value, and reuse creates new value”. In the opening remarks of the event program, Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, head of Data Publishing at Springer Nature, wrote that the event is meant to showcase the experiences of researchers and technologists who are “walking the walk of open, reproducible research”. Among those walking the walk was Thomas Lecocq, a seismologist who is involved with the Gräfenberg array: a series of seismological stations in Germany that record continuous seismic data and make it available in real-time through an open source platform. Using the “noise” data — the part of the continuous data signal free of recorded earthquakes — Lecocq showed that the signal can be used for monitoring changes to ground water storage on a very fine spatial scale. This is an ideal example of how data that is collected for a given purpose, such as earthquake detection, can be reused in highly creative ways for novel purposes."