This will make it possible to consistently describe the enormous and radically different databases that are compiled in the biosciences in fields ranging from genetics to stem cell science, to environmental studies.

“We are now working together to provide the means to manage enormous quantities of otherwise incompatible data, ranging from the biomedical to the environmental,” says Dr. Susanna-Assunta Sansone, the BBSRC-funded Team Leader of the project and iCommons Ltd Board member, based the University of Oxford’s e-Research Centre.

A commentary, published on Friday (27 February) in the in the journal Nature Genetics describes an ecosystem of standard-compliant data curation and sharing solutions and the establishment of its on-line presence, the ISA Commons. The commentary is signed by all the collaborators.

“An example of how this works at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute is that we can now find a relationship between experiments involving normal blood stem cells in fish and cancers in children”, says Winston Hide, director of HSCI’s new Center for Stem Cell Bioinformatics, and an associate Professor of Bioinformatics at the Harvard School of Public Health.

“One of the things that I find most empowering about this effort is that now small research groups can begin to store laboratory data using this framework, complying with community standards, without their own dedicated bioinformatics support. It is a bit like Facebook allowing everyone to create their own website pages – suddenly you don’t need to be an expert in computing to get your data out to the rest of the world”, says Jules Griffin, of the University of Cambridge.

See also the Editorial, It’s not about the data, in the same issue.

• Open Access (OA) to scientific publications could provide more effective dissemination of research and thus increase its impact.
• The costs and benefits of different models of providing OA to publications need to be considered if a comprehensive shift to OA is to be financially sustainable.
• OA to research data could enable others to validate findings and re-use data to advanceknowledge and promote innovation.
• Sharing data openly requires effective data management and archiving. It also presents challenges relating to protecting intellectual property and privacy.
• Expanding access to scientific information requires researchers, librarians, higher education institutions, funding agencies and publishers, to continue to work together.

The full report is available here.

COMMUNIA is supportive of the Commission’s suggested changes to the PSI Directive — most notably the decision to include cultural heritage institutions into the scope of the amended Directive.  The paper draws attention to two issues where the proposal to amend the Directive should be improved. The first one recommends more consistent permissioning terms for use of public sector information that falls within the scope of the Directive and the second urges the inclusion of public domain content that is held by libraries, museums and archives.

iCommons Ltd is a member of COMMUNIA.

SCRIPTed

Founded by Professors Lilian Edwards and Graeme Laurie, the journal is an online, international, interdisciplinary and multi-lingual journal of peer-reviewed articles, analysis pieces, case and legislation critiques, as well as commentaries, reports, and book reviews pertaining to law, society, and technologies in the broadest sense.

SCRIPTed draws on a thriving postgraduate community of students from around the world and benefits from the close ties of that community with the Faculty of Law.  The Editorial Board is assisted by an Advisory Board of internationally-renowned experts drawn from the disciplines of intellectual property, information technology, medical law, artificial intelligence, communications law and E-commerce.

Further assistance for authors and artists can be found in the Submission Guidelines.

Let’s CC offers quick and easy access to search services provided by some companies from one single page like search.creativecommons.org. It makes use of the APIs provided by Fiickr, Jamendo, ccMixter, Youtube and Slideshare, so you can find CC-licensed images, sounds, videos and docs at once with just one click.  Users can also save favorite contents, add tags to them, search them and check  favorite contents of all users.  Let’s CC also allows users to display favorites located the top of search results so as to find more relevant contents easily.

Feedback is welcome at creative@cckorea.org .

All data generated by public bodies, will be made available for re-use. Open data will be the norm, rather than the exception, and the EC aims to puts itself in “the top of the class”, Commissioner Kroes said.

The EC itself will open up its data for re-use in the first half of 2012, with a test version of the data portal to provide that access already being ready. Other agencies will be pushed to join that initiative, which is to serve as an example for individual Member States. “We will dare the Member States” to outdo the EC in opening up data, was the challenge Mrs Kroes put before other public sector bodies.

The Commission proposes to update the 2003 Directive on the re-use of public sector information (PSI Directive 2003/98) by:

• Making it a general rule that all documents made accessible by public sector bodies can be re-used for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, unless protected by third party copyright;
• Establishing the principle that public bodies should not be allowed to charge more than costs triggered by the individual request for data (marginal costs); in practice this means most data will be offered for free or virtually for free, unless duly justified.
• Making it compulsory to provide data in commonly-used, machine-readable formats, to ensure data can be effectively re-used.
• Introducing regulatory oversight to enforce these principles;
• Massively expanding the reach of the Directive to include libraries, museums and archives for the first time; the existing 2003 rules will apply to data from such institutions.

“The Government, in line with our overarching commitment to transparency and open data, is committed to ensuring that publicly-funded research should be accessible free of charge. Free and open access to taxpayer-funded research offers significant social and economic benefits by spreading knowledge, raising the prestige of UK research and encouraging technology transfer. At the moment, such research is often difficult to find and expensive to access. This can defeat the original purpose of taxpayer-funded academic research and limits understanding and innovation. “

The document also sets expectations for openly shared repositories:

“The Research Councils expect the researchers they fund to deposit published articles or conference proceedings in an open access repository at or around the time of publication. But this practice is unevenly enforced. Therefore, as an immediate step, we have asked the Research Councils to ensure the researchers they fund fulfil the current requirements. Additionally, the Research Councils have now agreed to invest £2 million in the development, by 2013, of a UK ‘Gateway to Research’. In the first instance this will allow ready access to Research Council funded research information and related data but it will be designed so that it can also include research funded by others in due course. The Research Councils will work with their partners and users to ensure information is presented in a readily reusable form, using common formats and open standards.”

The CC global network and community have been invited to contribute to the process, all of which is set out in this blog post:

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/30676

San Francisco is often thought of as the utopian edge of open government development: The city boasts the first city-level open data law in the United States, has its own app store, and even had 8 out of 9 mayoral candidates sign onto an Open Government Pledge (drafted by CityCamp alum) during this year’s race. But Adriel Hampton, a long time opengov advocate, connector, and CityCamp San Francisco lead, thinks his city — and state — can do one better. Adriel and other Gov 2.0 advocates want both San Francisco and California to institute an open data standard — that is, a legal definition of open data — and they’re kicking off a campaign at this weekend’s upcomingCityCampSF Hackathon to see it through.

Often when documents and data are published online, they cannot be accessed or used in a meaningful fashion because they cannot be searched, indexed by Google, or combined in a meaningful way with other documents for analysis. I want to tackle this not by mandating that certain documents and data be published online, but simply by creating a reference standard so that when new mandates pass, or new documents are published online as a matter of course under existing law or regular business, they are in accessible formats.

Right now, you can get involved by joining Sunlight and over 100 other opengov and transparency advocates in endorsing the campaign, signing up to volunteer, and learning more about the cause. Head over to the campaign’s homepage for more information.

In Europeana’s own words, the licensing framework “underpins Europeana’s Strategic Plan” for 2011-2015:

“The goal of the Europeana Licensing Framework is to standardize and harmonize rights-related information and practices. Its intention is to bring clarity to a complex area, and make transparent the relationship between the end-users and the institutions that provide data.”

“Users need good and reliable information about what they may do with [content]. Whether they can freely re-use it for their educational, creative or even commercial projects or not. The Europeana Licensing Framework therefore asks data providers to provide structured rights information in the metadata they provide about the content that is accessible through Europeana. Doing so makes it easier for users to filter content by the different re-use options they have – by ‘public domain’, for example and hence easier for users to comply with licensing terms.”

The framework supports re-use of data and content through CC legal tools (CC0 public domain dedication, the Public Domain Mark, and CC BY-SA), providing guidelines for their appropriate applications. Download the European Licensing Framework (pdf) or peruse the full set of resources at Europeana Connect.