Jean-Claude Bradley of Chemistry World recently wrote, “Almost a decade ago, the term ‘podcasting’ grabbed society’s imagination. Although sharing audio and video files over the internet had been possible for some time, the technology for creating, disseminating and following media reached a critical mass for the average internet user. Predictably, this situation represented different opportunities for different factions of the ideological spectrum. At one end, some saw new means to monetise their skill sets and products. At the other end, another group recognised a means for the radical sharing of knowledge. For the majority, the opportunities lay somewhere in the middle – for example, freely sharing some content with the hope of selling another portion, or freely sharing content but with restrictions on its use.” Read more

John Wilbanks of Nature.com recently opined, “An article that is free to read is not necessarily open for all uses — often, it cannot be reused for text mining or in derivative works, for example. The permitted uses depend on the copyright license used by the author. In my view, for an article to be considered truly open access, it has to meet the widely accepted definition in the Budapest Open Access Initiative — a set of recommendations laid out by leaders of the open-access movement in 2001. That is, users must be able to ‘read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited’.” Read more

Anna Leach of the Wall Street Journal reports, “New scientific research must be published for free online, the vice-president of the European Commission said, in a move designed to increase the knowledge pool open to small business and lead to more innovative products. All scientists receiving European Union funding will have to publish their results in an open-access format, Neelie Kroes, the commissioner responsible for Europe’s digital agenda, said Monday in Stockholm.  Ms. Kroes also  launched the global Research Data Alliance — a group committed to pooling and co-ordinating scientific data so it can be shared better.”

Leach continues, “Opening up scientific research is good for small business, said Victor Henning, CEO of British startup Mendeley, which aims to make academic research more connected. He has noticed the demand for access to academic research from small businesses. Read more

Laura Newman reports that a new session will be happening at OKFest this year. She writes, “At Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw last year, much discussion took place about academic research around Open Data. In response to these conversations, a specific ‘Open Data Academic Research’ session will be taking place at OKFest this year. The session will bring together a community of researchers from a variety of disciplines who are exploring Open Data from a range of perspectives. The Open Data research session will focus on the impact of Open Data research within the academic environment. The session will bring together the latest research concerning Open Data and Open Government Data, forming an interdisciplinary mix of short presentations followed by a discussion panel.” Read more

Applied Data Labs has launched a project aimed at unlocking the power of public data. The release states, “Have you ever wondered why Montana is the happiest state? Or why Mitt Romney is the front runner? These questions and others like them heavily influence our economy, our politics, and even everyday life, but the data that holds the answers is scattered far and wide. This is now changing thanks to the Fusion Project which is combing the vast data stores of government and research institutions alike to create one massively powerful data set.” Read more

According to a new article, “Purdue University Libraries is leading the development of a new, online resource that will help people locate research data on the Internet. The project is called Databib and will engage a community of librarians from around the world to collaborate in creating an online bibliography of data repositories that can be used by researchers, students, funding agencies, and other librarians to find appropriate places to access and share research data. The Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, a federal research agency, awarded a grant to support the project.” Read more

The current issue of Science, “the world’s leading journal of original scientific research, global news, and commentary,” has set its focus on data. The February 11, 2011 issue of the magazine seeks to “provide a broad look at the issues surrounding the increasingly huge influx of research data.” The collection of articles includes contributions from fellow magazines Science Signaling, Science Translational Medicine and Science Careers. Read more