Group items tagged

This blog about Open Data Developments in Asia analyses the recent state of Open Data adopted in Asia and highlights some of the 11 Asian countries participants that attended the Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva in 2012. Of the 11 countries that attended the conference, the author of the post focuses on the East Asian and Pacific countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar and discusses their state and role in Openness. The author does a good job at providing statistics of the different countries in terms of the Worldbank Knowledge Economy Index (KEI), which analyzes the economic rankings of countries. The author then compares economic rank to that of openness, stating that countries low on the economic rank contribute little to no open data within their own countries or externally to other countries. Next, the author talks about the overall internet penetration in Asia as being only 27.5 percent and in that statistic, there is still a wide gap between North and South East Asia in terms of internet use and information distribution and acquisition from citizens and others. Moreover, the author continues to compare how many social, economical, political and cultural influence information distribution, contribution and acquisition in Asia countries. Openness is growing in the more developed Asian countries, but openness is limited, or even nonexistent, in developing (authoritative) countries. After reading this article, I've had a greater understanding of the current state of Open Data in Asia an the influences that contribute to enabling Openness. What I expected from the blog post or something that would've made the post even better could be some examples or projects of Openness or Open Data in Asia.

Seen on Open Knowledge Foundation "Recently Brazilian government released the Kit de Dados Abertos (open data toolkit): The toolkit is made up of documents describing the process, methods and techniques for implementing an open data policy within an institution. Its goal is to both demystify the logic of opening up data and to share with public employees observed best practices that have emerged from a number of Brazilian government initiatives. The toolkit focuses on the Plano de Dados Abertos - PDA (Open Data Plan) as the guiding instrument where commitments, agenda and policy implementation cycles in the institution are registered. making it a state policy and not just a transitory governmental action. It is organizsd to facilitate the implementation of the main activities cycles that must be observed in an institution and provides links and manuals to assist in these activities. Emphasis is given to the actors/roles involved in each step and their responsibilities. Is also helps to define a central person to monitor and maintain the PDA. The following diagram summarises the macro steps of implementing an open data policy in an institution - See more at: http://blog.okfn.org/2014/10/07/branzilian-government-develops-toolkit-to-guide-institutions-in-both-planning-and-carrying-out-open-data-initatives/#sthash.kNvTB6nC.dpuf and http://kit.dados.gov.br/

"The Open Source Malaria project is trying a different approach to curing malaria. Guided by open source principles, everything is open and anyone can contribute."

Open Source Malaria is an effort to find medicine for malaria faster by opening up the data and the process. There are even some non-science tasks in a to-do list!  https://github.com/OpenSourceMalaria/OSM_To_Do_List/labels/Non-Science 

"Every day we face challenges - from the personal, such as the quickest way to get to work, or what we should eat, to global ones like climate change and how to sustainably feed and educate seven billion people on this planet. At Open Knowledge we believe that opening up data - and turning that data into insight - can be crucial to addressing these challenges, and building a society in which is everyone - not just the few - are empowered with the knowledge they need to understand and effect change."

really good! I think this is a very good summary about what we are learning in this course: "We need to create a culture of "open data makers", people able and ready to make apps and insights with open data. We need to connect open data with those who have the best questions and the biggest needs - a healthcare worker in Zambia, the London commuter travelling home - and go beyond the data geeks and the tech savvy to make data be useful to all."

"An interactive network aiming to gather observations on whether, and under which conditions, open approaches to research and collaboration could lead to various development outcomes in the Global South." Also highlights open development, goal is to construct "....a conceptual framework and a 'Theory of Change' on how open science norms and practices could be further established in developing countries via a community-based and networked-driven approach, while building on key lessons learned from the funded case studies, and from other ongoing open initiatives"

An interesting article arguing for the creation of open licenses for data. They make the point that the use of creative commons licenses is mistaken as these are designed for creative work not data or data bases. Unfortunately the argument - which is repeated several times - is not very thoroughly presented. The Talis Community License is mentioned as a possible alternative. The paper dates from 2008 and is thus - apart from the forceful argument for open licenses as the more viable alternative to the public domain - primarily of historical interest. Much progress has been made in the field with Open Data Commons Licenses now being an accepted standard as well as well as country specific licenses such as Open Government License UK, Open Government License Canada or Data License Germany (cf. http://opendefinition.org/licenses/).

"Larger than the Open Access warz, I feel that I have a moral responsibility to increase the access to science careers for women and minorities. I can't hold the door open for those folks unless I am standing on the other side of it. That means getting tenure and if someone tells me that I can get closer to those goals by forgoing Open Access for a round or two, I'm going to do it."

Slides from Leslie Chan's talk on What is Open Science and What Role Does it Play in Development?

Is true that open access benefits the academic development of students and agree with it, but it would also be important to know whether college students and teachers and researchers know how to use information resources open access or if known. It is important to give more publicity to information resources in order to open the knowledge society makes use of them to create new knowledge for society.

A poster that explores "the balance between benefits and concerns in relation to openness to knowledge and data. We will showcase the current impact potential of open science and open innovation, while considering intellectual property, the right for commercial exploitation of innovative concepts and the need for privacy legislation preventing misuse of personal data."

"Special edition on didactics of Open and Online Education(Publicatie) This special edition contains several articles and intermezzos on the didactics of Open and Online Education."

Thank you Lauren. You've found a great resource from my home country!

Michael Eisen is a researcher at UC Berkley and a co-founder of Public Library of Science. He discusses the news that the American Association for the Advancement of Science named Kent Anderson as its new Publisher, who is a critic of the open access movement. The most interesting thing for me was the mention in his blog post as well as in the comments section by another, that it is perhaps a trend for scholarly publications to produce open access journals. A peculiar motive, to perhaps "own" the open movement? It would be interesting to learn more about this trend, motivations behind it, and the implications on how that affects the OA movement.

And then a quick Google search found an announcement that Nature will be fully open access as of 20 October 2014... but still costs $5,200 USD to cover the article processing charges - perhaps Universities should (will) start to pay these costs instead of the high costs of subscriptions to scholarly journals as they continue to open up their access. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/open_access/index.html

Wow--these article publishing charges are ridiculous. I don't know if the scholars whose work gets published in these esteemed journals have budgets that would allow them to cover such fees, but I am sure that I wouldn't be able to get multiple articles covered by grants for my own work in the social sciences. And I'm 99% sure that the public universities I've worked for would not be ponying up that kind of money to cover my publication fees. This seems like yet another way to penalize scholars working in fields that don't get big grants or living in countries that don't have this kind of money to throw around. I prefer the UK's policy of requiring all nationally funded research to be published open access without any publication fees. That's the only way to even the playing field.

Partnership between several British medical charities to require open publishing of all funded research. 

This blog examines open data that is provided by the New York City government. It is written by a visiting assistant professor at Pratt College in Brooklyn NY. He uses the open data in his statistics and city planning course there. The interesting thing is that every open data set has a story to tell. Journalists are realizing this and are starting to analyze this open data to write stories, it is called data journalism. If you are interested data journalism, there is a course offered on the canvas network titled Doing Journalism with Data: First Steps, Skills and Tools (link provided) https://www.canvas.net/courses/doing-journalism-with-data The great thing about this in my opinion is that with open data the world starts to become more transparent. Everyone with some statistical knowledge can access these data, analyze them, and answer questions.

Many interesting charts and data of the global internet use, access, and contributions

Atlas, publications, charts and tables of global information and internet geographies and impacts on information access, information production and information distribution, done over a four year period by Oxford Information Institute. Findings, data, and publication will be published in Open Access formats and platforms. The website is simple but contains lots of information relevant to the topics in Stanford. There are links to external related publications about information geography, access, distribution and production. Very good website. Some limitations include: bias from the two developers and producers as well as institution itself, unknown (not identified) contributors and sponsors.

A very valuable collection demonstrating how economic, political, cultural and linguistic ties impact the flow of knowledge is and information. Of course, such charts do little to explain, why this happens and where a more even distribution of knowledge is desirable. Also, the data that lies behind the visualisations is not always open. Especially vauable are the links to the data collections that are accessible.

"Open data could add up to $3 trillion worth of economic activity per year worldwide, according to a study by McKinsey Consultants. But in the race to liberate thousands of data-sets from the government and business sectors, the African continent is seen as lagging behind. "

If there is any continent that needs Open Data most, it is Africa. African needs transparency and accountability, which are the core foundation of Open Data, to create meaningful change on the continent. But making data available and Open is just the initial stage of accomplishing something. The challenge here is how to ensure that the people of Africa have knowledge of the information and are ABLE to ACCESS the information. What use is information when still limited Internet access, scarce electricity, and other ICT infrastructure, including language barriers continue to act as roadblocks to accessing Open data? Wow!! Just when I finished this short posting, the light went off. Couldn't access the Internet. Everything is dead. I have being waiting 30mins, 1hr, 2hrs, 2hrs 45mins … and now its 4hrs and my laptop battery power is running down. ALAS!! Finally power is restored after 4hrs 49mins for me to make my post. You feel me? This is not the exception, and this is not a coincidence but the norm

"So what did I learn from this novel experience? For me, it was the combined power of social media and open access publishing. Social media acted as a sign post to the research for a wide range of people, largely outside academia. Open access then meant that everyone could read it."

Open Access Resources aims to remove constraints in access to articles and knowledge for academic-intellectual world community, particularly in the developing countries. Scientists from these countries still have trouble posting their works due to limitations of network access, institutional economic difficulties and lack of information about solutions available Open Access. It is expected that the Open Access increase understanding of educational and research opportunities to unite the world.

You could be interested in this too: http://sdu.ictp.it/index.html SDu is developing also a videocapture integrated system so that for a small investment lessons can be recorded and shared online http://www.openeya.org/ ...even infrastructures must be open....

"Research papers aren't always the easiest pieces of literature to read. Expecting Joe Public to understand all of these articles is simply unrealistic. Whilst they have access to the papers when they're open access, that doesn't mean they're always going to be able make good use of them. That's where social media has its time to shine. More and more scientists are moving to social media in order to promote their research and engage the public, as well as each other. Social media in itself offers the chance to reach out and make science exciting."