Speaker
Peter Murray-Rust
(Department of Chemistry, Cambridge University, UK)
Description
Note: Peter's slides are web-page-based and can be downloaded and then viewed from
the file communal.oai4/index.html. It requires an SVG-enabled HTML viewer.
Research in STM fields routinely generates and requires large amounts of data in
electronic form. The growth of scientific research using infrastructures such as the
Grid, UK's eScience programme and cyber infrastructure requires the re-use,
repurposing and redissemination of this information. Fields like bioinformatics,
astronomy, physics, and earth/environmental sciences routinely use such data as
primary research input. Much of this is now carried out by machines which harvest
data from multiple sources in dynamic and iterative ways, validate, filter compute
and republish it.
The current publication process and legal infrastructure is now a serious hindrance
to this. Most STM data are never published and the re-usability of those that are is
often unclear as authors and publishers give no explicit permission. However almost
all authors intend that published data (non-copyrightable “facts”) are for the re-use
of and redissemination to the STM community and the world in general. Many publishers
agree with this, but most do not actively support the effective publication of data,
through disinterest or the lack of a viable business proves. Some, however, appear to
assert ownership and control over factual data, debarring robots and charging for access.
The new technology offers enormous scope for different models for the publication and
use of Open STM data and some will be demonstrated. To develop the necessary culture
for this, SPARC has generously agreed to provide a discussion list (SPARC-OpenData)
on which PM-R will be the first moderator.
PM-R home page: http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk
Primary author
Peter Murray-Rust
(Department of Chemistry, Cambridge University, UK)
