Workshop on Finding and Re-using open scientific resources

Participants

• Jonathan Gray, The Open Knowledge Foundation
• Peter Murray-Rust, Cambridge University

• Sabine McNeill, 3D Metrics and Forum for Stable Currencies

• Non Scantlebury, The Open University (Head of Library Research and Innovation)
• Jessie Hey, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
• Rufus Pollock, The Open Knowledge Foundation
• Terence Freedman, The National Archives
• Hilary Smith, The University of Sussex
• Frank Norman, MRC National Institute for Medical Research [Head of Library]

• Rhian Cunliffe, BioMed Central

• Vincent Rouilly, Open Wetware
• Cameron Neylon, Open Wetware + STFC
• Tim Hubbard, Sanger Institute
• Giota Alevizou, LSE

Agenda

• Introductions/opening discussion
• Discussion of openness
  • Licensing clarity
• Funders - what policies
• How do we do data sharing (cost, the recipe, the standards)
• Registries
• Lunch
• Examples: successes and failures
• Finding open educational and scientific resources
  • labelling open/closed resources
  • Sciences, social sciences, arts, humanities etc
  • Finding and accessing: registries (again), (shiny) front-ends, software etc
  • By MACHINES ...
  • mapping the discovery landscape?
• Research funding/training
• Education (about openness) among students/researchers

Planned Actions

Focus on 3 main things:

1. Providing a simple recipe for making things open
2. Advocacy: benefits of openness, education, changing funder mandates

3. http://www.ckan.net/ -- editors/curators, expanding coverage

1. Simple Recipe

1. Unlocking/clarification service: a simple way for people to ask for data to be made open (or have its status clarified)

   • Simple template email. Some already done at http://www.opendefinition.org/resources

   • Could turn this into a service by having the email generated and response recorded
2. 'How to make my data open': Basic 1-2-3 webpage
   1. Choose license (do I have the rights?)
   2. Apply license (insert url, say how you want to be cited)
   3. Make data available somewhere (archive.org)
   4. [Optional]: register it (e.g. CKAN)

2. Advocacy

1. Prepare 1-page summaries of benefits of openness (altruistic and 'selfish'). Some of this can be standard but a good portion needs to be specific to the subject area
   • more citations/usage
   • eligible for openness award
   • giving also means receiving
   • very easy to do
   • satisfy funder requirements simply and easily
2. Include openness as part of best-practice (see recipes above)
3. Talk to funders about mandating/considering data openness as part of their policies

3. http://www.ckan.net/

Already have a good number of data 'packages' in CKAN in scientific areas: http://www.ckan.net/tag/read/science. However would be useful to supplement current efforts with more permanent editorship/curatorship:

1. Appoint named curators/editors in particular areas (chemistry,astronomy, bioinformatics etc)
2. Provide clear guidance as to what packaging could involve
   • tagging
   • clarifying open/closed status
     • Connect this with unlocking service
     • ensuring download url
   • uploading data to a reliable repository
   • checking data etc

Notes

• What is 'open'? Value of openness. Sharing, integrating data into other projects/datasets.
• Access + *re-use*!
• Attribution + Sharealike
• Privacy concerns? Reducing barriers while accounting for such concerns. Multiple tiers?
• Anonymisation + pseudo anonymisation?
• Doesn't work for genetic data
• Virtual machine which guarantees certain things can't happen
• No simple one size fits all rule
• Different communities want different things
• Each community will look at how open their data is in their community
• Science Commons pushes for public domain (no restrictions - inc. Attribution/Sharealike)
• License incompatibility - problems with different licenses
• No discrimination against particular users/uses

• Open Knowledge Definition - http://www.opendefinition.org

• Licenses and other legal tools (waivers, declarations,...) and non-legal tools (community norms + intentions + curses?)?
• EC Database Directive (cf. Creative Commons Zero, CC0, + PDDL)
• Very few people have litigated/taken action about attribution
• NIH + Wellcome Trust are supportive of openness/open access...
• Not all funders do this
• Large commercial interests
• Landscape of discovery
• Metadata?

• Searching for "solubility of boc glycine in thf" on http://www.oaister.org/ vs google

• Easier to use Google?
• Best practices - a document?
• Recipe
• Template for enquiries
• unlocking service for scientific datasets?
• existing work - :

  • http://www.opendoar.org/

  • http://roar.eprints.org/

  • http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

• point people to CC0/PDDL etc. other appropriate open licenses (e.g. http://opendefinition.org/licenses )

• questions about openness - checklist: http://shirleyfung.com/mbdb/filter.php?by=alltab

• http://www.opendatacommons.org/odc-public-domain-dedication-and-licence/

• http://www.oaister.org/ interesting to query datasets - includes 'rights' metadata

• http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenEnvironmentalData

• prizes, fellows, editors, ...
• held to best practices for licensing/rights for your field

• http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/

• case studies: 'i am a chemist...', 'i am an economist...' benefits of openness, motivations, experiences in different fields.. stories!
• instructions for being open
  • choose license
  • make it available (upload?)
  • ask questions
    • rights
    • who are you?
    • title
• where in the digital lifecycle? should be done from the start, not at the end (when it may be much more complex/messy)
• hosting data
• instructions/how-to for making data open (carrot cake)
• ethics: public accessibility
• OAISTER - free text in rights field

• SKOS - http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/