What can Public Open Data and Academia Learn From Each Other - Social Science Research

"This blog talks about the links that can be made between tools and methods used in academia and those in public open data and how the two worlds can learn from each other in order to promote greater use and re-use of data, track impact and make information more widely available  Professor Nigel Shadbolt recently visited the Library to talk to staff about the benefits of releasing public data into the wild. He didn't need to convince me, being a public sector researcher prior to joining the library I fought many licensing and cost battles to get my hands on the data needed for my research projects.  Due to policies like the Research Excellence Framework there is a big focus in academia to develop methods to measure the impact of research funded and undertaken and to promote the re-use of data created in this research. Tools like impactstory that allow researchers to gauge the impact of their research outputs are already being created using open infrastructure being supported by the British Library and our partners in science and publishing.  These tools work by assigning a digital object identifier to a research output (datasets, papers etc.) which can then be tracked through to citations. ORCID is new system that allows researchers (academic and non-academic) researchers to register a unique identifier for themselves and attach their research outputs via DOIs and other identifiers. These help to link the researchers to their outputs and membership is available to any researcher: academic, public sector, open data hacker etc.  Currently it seems to me that the impact of open data is judged by the number of visible applications that have been developed and headline findings published in the media.  Currently it seems to me that the impact of open data is judged by the number of visible applications that have been developed and headline findings published in the media. However imagine the situation if a dataset posted on data.gov.uk had one of these trackable DOI’s attached to it and open data users and researchers cited the use of this data using the DOI; a public sector data creator or an organisation as a whole could then track this, see what their data was being used for and what type of impact it was having. This could have potentially huge benefits for encouraging the sharing and re-use of public data and could help to provide evidence to support the collection and maintenance of certain types of well used data...'