Your trusty blogger attended Data Access Questions: Open and Shut (session D3)....
Susan Cadogan, member of the acquisitions team at the UK data archive, opened with a review of the archive from 1967 to date, its expansion and a review of the legal framework for data deposit, maintenance, and dissemination. Access to deposits is governed by one of three access conditions: completely open access for researchers, access with the archive acting on behalf of the depositor, and use dependent on permission of the depositor (the last only on request). The remainder was a discussion of relations with depositors in general and development of the requisite agreements governing access and use as they’ve changed over time. Although the goal is to make data available as widely as possible, it’s also governed by requirements of the end-user license. Over time, the collection has expanded in scope to include datasets with a greater degree of detail and wider geographic coverage, both of which can correlate with increased disclosure risks....
Keit Bang was lead presenter of When Data Aren’t Open....
Robert Downs, senior digital archivist, represented CIESIN presenters on the topic of the Creative Commons licensing movement and the combined goals of allowing people to use and redistribute their data, document use, provide appropriate attribution, and track provenance. Traditional data licensing is, of course, challenging, fraught with time-consuming paperwork, records maintenance hassles, and others too numerous to detail here....There are two parts to permissions issues for CIESIN: getting permissions from data providers (including identifying ownership, not easy in the case of researcher collaborations), requesting non-exclusive rights for CIESIN, avoiding use restrictions whenever possible, requesting permission to permit 3rd party redistribution. The second component concerns what can be called the user or distribution end: establishing use and re-distribution, determining what parts may be copyrighted versus freely distributable....
Tanvi Desai, database manager at LSE Research Laboratory, supports about 200 academic researchers. She shared her experiences regarding procedures to gain access to Eurostat products....
Here's another Pam Baxter post on a different session:
An overriding theme of the A1 session, Self-Archiving or Self Storage, was empowering data producers to participate in creating and providing metadata for their materials. Another way to describe it: involving researchers in these processes by meeting them where they’re at with the most flexible tools possible. I must also mention that this was an extremely popular session, drawing a standing-room-only crowd....
Ken Miller and Graham Pryor discussed the background of StORe (Source-to-Output Repositories), generally envisioned as a mechanism to link literature to its underlying data. The most recent phase extended the concept to non-social science disciplines and involved surveying the practices of about 3,000 researchers. There is an overriding opinion that although open access to data is great for consumers, producers still rely on well-established professional networking to learn about and access specialized data. Based on the concept of institutional repositories, a middleware gathers essential study-level metadata elements from researchers (in a reasonably painless fashion!). Its goal is to be simple; permit searching to replicate the browsing experience; be reasonably “unbureaucractic;” permit data self management; and provide researchers with latitude to determine such elements as which items will be public, who has access to the data products, and how long data would be embargoed. For further information, see the extensive StORe wiki.
Marion Witenberg and Rutger Kramer of DANS presented on the EASY initiative. Again, the focus is on providing a relatively painless mechanism for researchers to deposit datasets themselves using a flexible and customized tool.....As a unit, DANS is responsible for storing and providing access to research data in the social sciences and humanities. EASY was designed so that depositors supply core metadata with a minimal intervention from a data archivist, if desired.....
Charlie Thomas represented UC Berkeley’s SDA team. SDA 3.1 was released a few weeks ago and includes an application for loading datasets. Said application, an “archiver,” employs a graphical web-based interface and requires three files (ascii data, metadata in DDL format, and a grouped variable list). The archiver is highly customizable....The presentation handout can be viewed here....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/19/2007 03:39:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
