Abstract: Data are becoming an essential product of scholarship, complementing the roles of journal articles, papers, and books. Research data can be reused to ask new questions, to replicate studies, and to verify research findings. Data become even more valuable when linked to publications and other related resources to form a value chain. Types and uses of data vary widely between disciplines, as do the online availability of publications and the incentives of scholars to publish their data. Publishers, scholars, and librarians each have roles to play in constructing a new scholarly information infrastructure for e-research. Technical, policy, and institutional components are maturing; the next steps are to integrate them into a coherent whole. Achieving a critical mass of datasets in public repositories, with links to and from publisher databases, is the most promising solution to maintaining and sustaining the scholarly record in digital form.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/11/2007 06:59:00 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.
