Links, stories, images and articles about data-intensive research from Australia and beyond.
An unofficial blog created by the Australian Research data Commons (Formerly: Australian National Data Service (ANDS), Nectar & RDS)) for the purpose of recording and sharing external content. ARDC does not endorse the content posted.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) calls upon data innovators from a wide variety of fields— from data science, to civic tech, to epidemiology— to develop concepts for novel uses of existing data that will identify signals and achieve timelier alerts for biothreats in our cities and communities. Successful concepts will explore connections between multiple readily accessible data sources to develop real-time insights that can improve public safety responses to emerging biothreats. For more information and to register - Go here
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University Libraries, has released a new resource for tracking, comparing, and understanding U.S. federal funder research data sharing policies. This free tool, launched at datasharing.sparcopen.org, provides a detailed analysis of 16 federal agency responses to the directive issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research. Specifically, the new resource focuses on how these agencies intend to make the digital data associated with the projects they fund available for access and reuse. Browse or download the full dataset.
Over the past few months, researchers at the Department of Energy have been exploring new approaches for collecting, moving, sharing and analyzing massive scientific datasets.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently led four science data pilot projects to show what could be gained when the facilities and tools were specifically linked to carry out specialized research and to show the potential of a highly focused science data infrastructure, according to a DOE statement.
For access to research papers based on their funding, the AHRQ will follow the path already blazed by the NIH. Though the NIH has not officially announced a policy, representatives have stated that their PubMed Central (PMC) repository fulfills the White House’s requirements for research papers and will be their method of complying. Given that the NIH is required to use and maintain PMC by separate law, this is not surprising.
Many of the medical and health-related funding agencies are expected to take advantage of PMC for their own public access policies. The AHRQ will require funded authors to deposit their accepted article manuscripts to PMC, to be made publicly accessible after an embargo period of no more than 12 months after publication. It’s interesting to hear the AHRQ describe PMC, a public service of the National Library of Medicine, as a “private-public partnership”. It would be interesting to hear who they think the “private” partners are.
For the first time, the United States government has agreed to release what we believe to be the largest index of government data in the world.
On Friday, the Sunlight Foundation received a letter from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) outlining how they plan to comply with our FOIA request from December 2013 for agency Enterprise Data Inventories. EDIs are comprehensive lists of a federal agency’s information holdings, providing an unprecedented view into data held internally across the government. Our FOIA request was submitted 14 months ago.
These lists of the government's data were not public, however, until now. More than a year after Sunlight’s FOIA request and with a lawsuit initiated by Sunlight about to be filed, we’re finally going to see what data the government holds.
Amid the push to open access to more healthcare data, government and industry officials caution that datasets must come with context.
By Kenneth Corbin (CIO (US)) on 04 December, 2014
Bringing more data into the public domain may be a critical step toward increasing transparency in the famously opaque healthcare sector, but raw data alone will only go so far, experts warn.
At a conference on Monday at the Brookings Institution in Washington, industry and government officials cautioned that simply releasing data in bulk without context or meaningful comparative tools won't achieve the goals of lowering the costs of care, increasing operating efficiencies and, ultimately, improving care.
"We talk about transparency, and lately I find myself asking the question, what does that really mean?" says Stuart Guterman, vice president of Medicare and cost control at the Commonwealth Fund
See full article: http://www.cio.com.au/article/561001/what-does-all-healthcare-data-really-mean/
Ignoring the politics inherent in this - it is a pretty amazing data visualisation.
And the data is available for download so you can do your own analysis.
Graphic credit: Sunlight Foundation.
On Aug. 5, the Federal Communications Commission announced the bulk release of the comments from its largest-ever public comment collection. We've spent the last three weeks cleaning and preparing the data and leveraging our experience in machine learning and natural language processing to try and make sense of the hundreds-of-thousands of comments in the docket. Here is a high-level overview, as well as our cleaned version of the full corpus which is available for download in the hopes of making further research easier.
Our first exploration uses natural language processing techniques to identify topical keywords within comments and use those keywords to group comments together. We analyzed a corpus of 800,959 comments. Some key findings:
We estimate that less than 1 percent of comments were clearly opposed to net neutrality1.
At least 60 percent of comments submitted were form letters written by organized campaigns (484,692 comments); while these make up the majority of comments, this is actually a lower percentage than is common for high-volume regulatory dockets.
At least 200 comments came from law firms, on behalf of themselves or their clients.
The interactive visualization that lets you explore these groupings and view individual comments within the groups.
NIH Tells Genomic Researchers: ‘You Must Share Data'
By Paul Basken
Scientists who use government money to conduct genomic research will now be required to quickly share the data they gather under a policy announced on Wednesday by the National Institutes of Health.
The data-sharing policy, which will take effect with grants awarded in January, will give agency-financed researchers six months to load any genomic data they collect—from human or nonhuman subjects—into a government-established database or a recognized alternative.
White House supports CC0 for federal government datasets
Timothy Vollmer, May 9th, 2014
Today the White House released the U.S. Open Data Action Plan, reaffirming their belief that “freely available data from the U.S. Government is an important national resource… [and] making information about government operations more readily available and useful is also core to the promise of a more efficient and transparent government.” The report (PDF) outlines the commitments to making government data more accessible and useful, and documents how U.S. federal agencies are sharing government information. From a legal standpoint, some agencies have decided to place their datasets into the worldwide public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. This means that all copyright and related rights to the data are waived, so it may be used by anyone–for any purpose–anywhere in the world–without having to ask permission in advance–and even without needing to give attribution to the author of the data.
Two years after the White House issued its memo onExpanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research” we now have the second of the more than twenty policies to be announced (the first, from the Department of Energy [DOE] came out last August). The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has posted their policy for public access to research papers and to research data, and their approach differs significantly from that of the DOE. Some first impressions below…
READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/02/10/u-s-agency-for-healthcare-research-and-quality-ahrq-announces-public-access-policy/
Two years after the White House issued its memo onExpanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research” we now have the second of the more than twenty policies to be announced (the first, from the Department of Energy [DOE] came out last August). The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has posted their policy for public access to research papers and to research data, and their approach differs significantly from that of the DOE. Some first impressions below…
