By John Borghi and Daniella Lowenberg
It’s Open Access week and that means it’s time to spotlight and explore Open Data as an essential component to liberating and advancing research.
Let’s Celebrate!
Who: Everyone. Everyone benefits from open research. Researchers opening up their data provides access to the people who paid for it (including taxpayers!), patients, policy makers, and other researchers who may build upon it and use it to expedite discoveries.
What: Making data open means making it available for others to use and examine as they see fit. Open data is about more than just making the data available on its own, it is also about opening up the tools, materials, and documentation that describes how the data were collected and analyzed and why decisions about the data were made.
When: Data can be made open anytime a paper is published, anytime null or negative results are found, anytime data are curated. All the open data, all the time.
Where: If you are a UC researcher, resources free to you are available at each of your campuses Research Data Management library websites. Dash is a data publication platform to make your data open and archived for participating UC campuses, UC Press, and DataONE’s ONEShare. For more open data resources, check out our upcoming post on Wednesday, October 25th.
Why: Data are what support conclusions, discoveries, cures, and policies. Opening up articles for free access to the world is very important, but the articles are only so valuable without the data that went into them.
Follow this week as we cover policies, user stories, resources, economics, and justifications for why researchers should all be making their (de-identified, IRB approved) data freely available.
Tweet to us @UC3CDL with any questions, comments, or contributions you may have.
Upcoming Posts
Tuesday, October 24th: Open Data in Order to… Stories & Testimonials
Wednesday, October 25th: Policies, Resources, & Guidance on How to Make Your Data Open
Thursday, October 26th: Open Data and Reproducibility
Friday, October 27th: Open Data and Maximizing the Value of Research
