Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, April 17, 2008

More on libraries and open data

Stuart MacDonald, Libraries in the Converging Worlds of Open Data, E-Research, and Web 2.0, Online, March/April, 2008. (Thanks to Glen Newton.)  Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:

The new forms of research enabled by the latest technologies bring about collaboration among researchers in different locations, institutions, and even disciplines. These new collaborations have two key features -- the prodigious use and production of data. This data-centric research manifests itself in such concepts as e-science, cyberinfrastructure, or e-research. Over the last decade there has been much discussion about the merits of open standards, open source software, open access to scholarly publications, and most recently open data. There are a range of authoritative weblogs that address the open movement, some of which include: 1. DCC's Digital Curation Blog, 2. Peter Suber's Open Access News, and 3. Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog. The data used and produced in e-research activities can be extremely complex, taking different forms depending on the discipline. In the hard sciences, such as biochemistry data can take the form of images and numbers representing the structure of a protein.