Germany releases Open Data plan

Germany releases Open Data plan

http://www.verwaltung-innovativ.de/SharedDocs/Publikationen/Pressemitteilungen/nationaler_aktionsplan_open_data_englisch.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=1

2. Germany Releases Open Data Plan
The government of Germany released an open data action plan this week, pursuant to a G8 agreement in 2013 to improve open data efforts. The charter called for the member countries—which include Germany along with the United States, the UK, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, and Russia (which was suspended from the partnership in 2014)—to make openness the default standard for government data, implement open standards for publishing data, increase quality and quantity, and release data to drive innovation and improved governance. Germany’s action plan includes a description of how it will make more data sets on its national data portal machine readable and encourage cities and states to conform to the expectations set in the charter.

Linking data and publications

Do you want to see if a CrossRef DOI (typically assigned to publications) refers to DataCite DOIs (typically assigned to data)? Here you go:
http://api.labs.crossref.org/graph/doi/10.4319/lo.1997.42.1.0001
Conversely, do you want to see if a DataCite DOI refers to CrossRef DOIs? Voilà:
http://api.labs.crossref.org/graph/doi/10.1594/pangaea.185321

“How can we effectively integrate data into the scholarly record?” This is the question that has, for the past few years, generated an unprecedented amount of handwringing on the part researchers, librarians, funders and publishers. Indeed, this week I am in Amsterdam to attend the 4th RDA plenary in which this topic will no doubt again garner a lot of deserved attention.

We hope that the small example above will help push the RDAs agenda a little further. Like the recent ODIN project, It illustrates how we can simply combine two existing scholarly infrastructure systems to build important new functionality for integrating research objects into the scholarly literature.
Does it solve all of the problems associated with citing and referring to data? Can the various workgroups at RDA just cancel their data citation sessions and spend the week riding bikes and gorging on croquettes? Of course not. But my guess is that by simply integrating DataCite and CrossRef in this way, we can make a giant push in the right direction.

There are certainly going to be differences between traditional citation and data citation. Some even claim that citing data isn’t “as simple as citing traditional literature.” But this is a caricature of traditional citation. If you believe this, go off an peruse the MLA, Chicago, Harvard, NLM and APA citation guides. Then read Anthony Grafton’s, The Footnote? Are you back yet? Good, so let’s continue…

Citation of any sort is a complex issue- full of subtleties, edge-cases exceptions, disciplinary variations and kludges. Historically, the way to deal with these edge-cases has been social, not technical. For traditional literature we have simply evolved and documented citation practices which generally make contextually-appropriate use of the same technical infrastructure (footnotes, endnotes, metadata, etc.). I suspect the same will be true in citing data. The solutions will not be technical, they will mostly be social. Researchers, and publishers will evolve new, contextually appropriate mechanisms to use existing infrastructure deal with the peculiarities of data citation.

Does this mean that we will never have to develop new systems to handle data citation? Possibly But I don’t think we’ll know what those systems are or how they should work until we’ve actually had researchers attempting to use and adapt the tools we have.

Technical background

About five years ago, CrossRef and DataCite explored the possibility of exposing linkages between DataCite and CrossRef DOIs. Accordingly, we spent some time trying to assemble an example corpus that would illustrate the power of interlinking these identifiers. We encountered a slight problem. We could hardly find any examples. At that time, virtually nobody cited data with DataCite DOIs and, if they did, the CrossRef system did not handle them properly. We had to sit back and wait a while.
And now the situation has changed.
This demonstrator harvests DataCite DOIs using their OAI-PMH API and links them in a graph database with CrossRef DOIs. We have exposed this functionality on the “labs” (i.e. experimental) version of our REST API as a graph resource. So…
You can get a list of CrossRef DOIs that refer to DataCite DOIs as follows:
http://api.labs.crossref.org/graph?rel=cites:*&filter=source:crossref,related-source:datacite
And the converse:
http://api.labs.crossref.org/graph?rel=cites:*&filter=source:datacite,related-source:crossref

Caveats and Weasel Words

• We have not finished indexing all the links.
• The API is currently a very early labs project. It is about as reliable as a devolution promise from Westminster.
• The API is run on a pair of raspberry-pi’s connected to the internet via bluetooth.
• It is not fast.
• The representation and the API is under active development.

Read more on the CrossTech Blog...


Linking data and publications by Geoffrey Bilder, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Learned Publishing special issue on data and publishing

special issue on data and publishing (Open Access) published on Friday: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/latest and containing pieces by Sarah Callaghan, the F1000Research team, Andrew Treloar, Susan Reilly and others

Short, interesting video resources for data management

DCC: Managing Research Data

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JBQS0qKOBU (12mins)

In short: a range of fast moving viewpoints highlighting various aspects of research data management including its benefit to institutional reputation, advancement of knowledge etc. Acknowledges researcher fears for sharing data.

On the Clock: Open Data Executive Order

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n603rEnEGXA

about 2 mins

In short: this is direct from the White House and the Obama Administration and covers why open data is good for America. Kinda like speed dating: 2 guys making the points in 2 minutes!

Whose data is it anyway?

From Yale School of Medicine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzfWxI5Ap2I 

about 2 mins

In short: researchers need to share their data for the advancement of medicine

Sharing data: good for science, good for you

From DANS, Netherlands

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJbo-OAaJ1I

4.10mins

In short: starting with the inspiring Neelie Kroes from the European Commission, covers why open data is important and how researchers can benefit (including getting cited). It’s a mix of English and Dutch with English subtitles.

There was one I didn't use but it's a fantastic 3 part animation about a data management horror story from NYU. Funny and terrifying at the same time. You may have seen it as it's been out for a while:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVZbk3GEVSw  (part 1)