Open Data Licensing: is your data safe?

Just a quickie. Those of you interested in the issues raised by data licensing might want to take a look at Chris Rusbridge’s interesting discussion of the area on the Digital Curation Blog.

Electronic copyright, IPR and access issues in the emerging electronic landscape

This sounds relevant...

Electronic copyright, IPR and access issues in the emerging electronic
landscape

ALISS One Day Summer Conference British Library Conference Centre
13th August 9.30-4.30

From the announcement:

“On 13th August ALISS (Association of Librarians and Information
Professionals in the Social Sciences) will be holding a one day conference
on the topical issue of electronic copyright IPR and access issues. It will
include presentations from ongoing projects and practical tips from
practitioners. The speakers will include:

• Copyright and data licensing;, does electronic differ from print?' Richard Ebdon, Copyright Officer, The British Library.
• The practicalities of copyright in the online age. Helen Bartlett, Copyright Manager, HERON.
• Rights and responsibilities: managing electronic images Grant Young Technical Research Officer, TASI - Technical Advisory Service for Images.
• IPR and multimedia in institutional repositories: lessons from the MIDESS Lesley Pitman, Librarian and Director of Information Services, UCL SSEES Library.
• Librarians against plagiarism: how Imperial College London is using PRS and active learning to combat the cut and paste generation. Ruth Harrison and Julia Garthwaite.
• Irish Studies Online - JSTOR and the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis, QUB. Norma Menabney, Queen University, Belfast.

Cost: £75 ALISS Members, Non-Members £95. This will include a buffet lunch
and tea/coffee.


Registration: Places are limited. To register contact: Heather Dawson,
ALISS Secretary, LSE Library, 10 Portugal Street, London, WC2A 2HD.
h.dawson@lse.ac.uk"

Building the Infrastructure for Data Access and Reuse in Collaborative Research: A Legal Analysis

Another one from the domain of open knowledge but this time from the other side of the globe….

Researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have released a report entitled 'Building the Infrastructure for Data Access and Reuse in Collaborative Research: A Legal Analysis'. This has been produced as a result of two different QUT projects: Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law and Legal Framework for e-Research.

The announcement explains that the report:

"examines the legal framework within which research data is generated, managed, disseminated and used. It provides an overview of the operation of copyright law, contract and confidentiality laws, as well as a range of legislation - privacy, public records and freedom of information legislation – that is of relevance to research data. The Report considers how these legal rules apply to define rights in research data and regulate the generation, management and sharing of data. The Report also describes and explains current practices and attitudes towards data sharing. A wide array of databases is analysed to ascertain the arrangements currently in place to manage and provide access to research data. Finally, the Report encourages researchers and research organisations to adopt proper management and legal frameworks for research data outputs. It provides practical guidance on the development and implementation of legal frameworks for data management with the objective of ensuring that research data can be accessed and used by other researchers."

I must admit that I have only scanned this so cannot give an accurate review but at 274 pages we can probably safely assume that it is pretty comprehensive!

Guide To Open Data Licensing

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) has released a Guide To Open Data Licensing.

This is currently on their wiki at http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenDataLicensing

The OKF announcement said:

"While attending XTech back in May it became clear that there were a lot of questions both about the legal status of data and what approaches to use when licensing it.
...

We started work on the guide in order to have something which could help answer these kinds of questions. At present it is roughly divided into two sections. The first section deals with the practical question of how to license your data. The second section discusses what kinds of intellectual property-like rights exist in data in various jurisdictions.
This guide is very much in an ‘alpha’ state, with much that can be done to improve and extend it. We’ve been working on it in the wiki precisely so that anyone may edit it and we’d welcome contributions — whether it be adding new sections and use cases or just fixing typos. So please, check it out and feel free to make changes."

So do check the guide out and comment or contribute (if you’re into that kind of thing!)

Got 20 minutes? (Taking open data to another level)

I know. Who has? But if you can find it I really recommend watching this video (brought to my attention by Peter Suber on the SPARC Open Data list – thank you!). It’s a very interesting presentation by Hans Rosling where he de-bunks a few myths about the "developing" world. Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden's world-renowned Karolinska Institute. He is also the founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life.

In the first 15 minutes he provides a fascinating overview of the changes that have occurred in the world over the last 40 years in terms of child survival rates, average number of children per woman, life expectancy at birth, distribution of income, GDP per capita. The graphics he employs to make this understandable and engaging are wonderful. In the last 5 minutes he turns to the issue of the availability and usability of data (digital curation bells!!)

Rosling poses the question “why are we not using the data we have?” and answers:

“The data is hidden down in the databases. And the public is there, and the Internet is there but we have still not used it effectively. All that information we saw changing in the world [in the demonstration] does not include publicly funded statistics. There are some web pages like this …but people put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics. And this won’t work!”

He then asks, "what is needed?" His answer - "linking data to design."

That’s where Gapminder comes in. The website describes its purpose as:

“… filling a gap. There has been a market failure in distributing global data. A lot of people are interested in the data, but don’t get access to it (and if they manage to access the data, they need to be advanced skilled statisticians to analyze it). Gapminder wants to make data more accessible and easier to use for instant visual analysis. We believe decision makers, politicians as well as education at almost all levels lack adequate tools.”

The software is proving popular with many. Ben Hyde has blogged:

"These gapminder charts are just marvelous. They are a exemplar of what we should expect from data presentation going forward. Printed data’s days are numbered."

My main thought here is that better access to the data and greater understanding of what it demonstrates can only be a good thing in terms of international health and development.

But also, the software is not limited to use with international health data. The usefulness of its application to all types of data is ripe for exploration!

See Peter Suber's blog post on this topic

Image by Ilya Eric Lee on Flickr CC-NC-ND

Blogs as new sources of research data - what about privacy?

Last week I went to an interesting workshop at the e-Science institute in Edinburgh called ‘New Kinds of Social Data: from Blogs to Administrative data'.

The meeting was targeted at researchers in academia and government and those concerned with long time archiving and access of social data. My primary interest was in the privacy and data protection implications of using these new data resources. A talk I found particularly interesting was given by Karen McCullagh, entitled ‘Blogs archives and privacy’.

Karen is currently working on her PhD. You can find out more about her research project here. The survey on 'Bloggers Privacy Expectations and Attitudes ' is no longer live but Karen hopes to make the results of this survey available at this link shortly.

All of the presentations from the workshop are available online.

US to create a universal database of all its research results.

News that the US government is considering a massive plan to store almost all scientific data generated by federal agencies in publicly accessible digital repositories.

Read about it in Nature.com