On Friday, to coincide with Saturday’s International Open Data Day, the European Commission (EC) unveiled a new data portal, which will be used to publish data from the EC and other bodies of the European Union. This major project was announced last year, and it went live in December for testing before today’s announcement. The […]
On Friday 22nd February, 2013 the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a statement to say that the “Obama Administration is committed to the proposition that citizens deserve easy access to the results of scientific research their tax dollars have paid for”. This was accompanied by a new policy memorandum and a long-awaited response by OSTP […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation believes in open knowledge: not just that some data is open and freely usable, but that it is useful – accessible, understandable, meaningful, and able to help someone solve a real problem. A lot of the data which could help me improve my life is data about me – “MyData” if […]
Great News! Neelie Kroes, the Vice President of the European Commission, has sent her personal best wishes to the OKF team in Greece who launched their brand new open data portal last week! She said: “Open data is a very powerful lever for both a better economy and society. Open data is fuel for innovation, […]
This blog post is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog. For years now, the practice preregistering clinical trials has worked to reduce publication bias dramatically (Drummond Rennie offers more details). Trying to build on this trend for transparency, the Open Knowledge Foundation, which runs the Open Economics Working Group, has expressed support for All Trials […]
Recent years have seen a huge expansion in open data activity around the world. This is very welcome, but at the same time it is now increasingly difficult to assess if, and where, progress is being made. To address this, we started the Open Data Census in order to track the state of open data […]
On February 15-16 we are updating the Open Research Data Handbook to include more detail on sharing research data from scientific work, and to remix the book for different disciplines and settings. We’re doing this through an open book sprint. The sprint will happen at the Open Data Institute, 65 Clifton Street, London EC2A 4JE. […]
In 2010, I had a long paper about the history of German translations of Othello rejected by a prestigious journal. The reviewer wrote: “The Shakespeare Industry doesn’t need more information about world Shakespeare. We need navigational aids.” About the same time, David Berry turned me on to Digital Humanities. I got a team together (credits) […]
This blog post is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog. Sign up to the Open Economics mailing list for regular updates. Throughout the Eurozone, credit rating agencies have been under attack for their lack of transparency and for their pro-cyclical sovereign rating actions. In the humble belief that the crowd can outperform the credit rating […]
Belgium has been quiet for a while, but that doesn’t mean less busy. In fact, we’ve been so busy that from time to time we forgot to communicate! We hope to solve this with this winter update. ##Open Transport We love transport data. Our Open Transport Working Group, iRail, has just netted a front-end engineering […]
The deadline for nominations in the annual BioMed Central Open Data Awards is on January 31st. Get your votes in now! It’s been a big year for open science in general, and for BioMed Central in particular. We’ve been hard at work promoting the value of data-sharing, developing standards to make it more attractive to […]
The first Open Economics International Workshop gathered 40 academic economists, data publishers and funders of economics research, researchers and practitioners to a two-day event at Emmanuel College in Cambridge, UK. The aim of the workshop was to build an understanding around the value of open data and open tools for the Economics profession and the […]
At the Open Knowledge Foundation we work to cultivate a global commons of digital material that everyone is free to use and enjoy. This digital commons includes everything from open data about carbon emissions or spending from governments around the world; to open access research in the sciences, the humanities, and many other disciplines; to […]
We’re very pleased to announce that Andrew Stott, the UK’s former Director for Transparency and Digital Engagement who pioneered data.gov.uk, has joined the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Advisory Board. For those of you who aren’t familiar with him already from our events or from our open-government mailing list, here’s a brief bio: Andrew Stott was the […]
The ePSI platform team have announced “three days of open data fun” in Warsaw next month. The big day is the 2013 ePSI platform conference on 22nd February, but you’re also all invited to a workshop on the 21st, and a hackday on the 23rd! ###At a glance What?: ePSI conference, workshop and hackday When?: […]
Professor Hans Rosling, co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation and Advisory Board Member at the Open Knowledge Foundation, received a standing ovation for his keynote at OKFestival in Helsinki in September in which he urged open data advocates to demand CO2 data from governments around the world. Following on from this, the Open Knowledge […]
Calling all Transport Hackers! The Urban Data Challenge has launched, a semi-competitive open transport data hacking spree featuring datasets from San Francisco, Geneva, and Zurich. The idea is to merge and compare the mobility datasets, and see what new insights can be drawn. From their website: Buses, trams, bicycles, pedestrians, and cars zoom about modern […]
This month, the House of Lords science committee is hearing evidence on the likely effects of the new Research Councils UK (RCUK) Open Access policy that will come into force in April this year for all RCUK-funded researchers. The UK, and many other countries around the world are making this bold move to allow everyone […]
On February 15-16, the Open Research Data Handbook Sprint will happen at the Open Data Institute, 65 Clifton Street, London EC2A 4JE. The Open Research Data Handbook aims to provide an introduction to the processes, tools and other areas that researchers need to consider to make their research data openly available. Join us for a […]
This blog post is written by Eustáquio Reis, Senior Research Economist at the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Ipea) in Brazil and member of the Advisory Panel of the Open Economics Working Group. It is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog. The project Statistical Memory of Brazil aims to digitize and to make freely available […]
Earlier today we received a strange and intriguing press release from a certain ‘Marmaduke Robida’ claiming to be ‘Director for Public Domain Content’ at Gale Cengage’s UK premises in Andover. Said the press release: Gale, part of Cengage Learning, is thrilled to announce that all its public domain content will be freely accessible on the […]
This blog post is written by Ayeh Bandeh-Ahmadi, PhD candidate at the Department of Economics, University of Maryland. This past spring, I spent a few months at the crowdfunding company Kickstarter, studying a number of aspects of the firm from what makes some projects succeed while others fail, preferences among backers, predictors of fraud, and […]
You can follow all the goings-on today and tomorrow through the live stream. On 17-18 December, economics and law professors, data publishers, practitioners and representatives from international institutions will gather at Emmanuel College, Cambridge for the First Open Economics International Workshop. From showcasing the examples of successes in collaborative economic research and open data to […]
This blog post is written by Sven Vlaeminck | ZBW – German National Library of Economics / Leibniz Information Center for Economics Background In Economics, as in many other research disciplines, there is a continuous increase in the number of papers where authors have collected their own research data or used external datasets. However, so […]
Following some remarks from Richard Swetenham from the European Commission, we made a few changes relative to the trialogue process and the coming steps: the trialogue will start its meetings on 17th December and it is therefore already very useful to call on our governments to support Open Formats! When we work on building all […]
This blog post is written by Jorge Zapico, researcher at the Center for Sustainable Communications at KTH The Royal Institute of Technology and Velichka Dimitrova, Project Coordinator for Economics and Energy at the Open Knowledge Foundation Sign up to Open Sustainability Sustainability is one of the most important challenges of our time. We are facing […]
Privacy has long been the focus of debates about how to use and disseminate data taken from human subjects during clinical research. The increasing push to share data freely and openly within biomedicine poses a challenge to the idea of private individual information, whose dissemination patients and researchers can control and monitor. In order to […]
Horizon 2020 is the EU’s proposed new programme for research and innovation, which would run from 2014 to 2020. The programme would create an “Innovation Union” with a budget of €80million, bringing together current research and innovation funding available through a number of sources. On 28th November MEPs are set to vote on the proposals, […]
This blog post is based on Christina’s paper, “The Myth of European Term Harmonisation – 27 Public Domains for 27 Member States”. This is a shortened version of the post – the full version is available on the OpenGLAM blog. Copyright is supposed to be a temporary right: once it has expired, works automatically fall […]
A project at the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) is making fantastic use of the Pybossa tool (a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Citizen Cyberscience Centre) in a citizen science project called ‘Feynman’s Flowers’, which launched this weekend. The project asks members of the public to help unlock the secrets of magnetism […]
Here’s an interesting project using slightly unorthodox means to get data out into the open: crowdfunding the purchase of US healthcare data for subsequent open release. The company behind the project is NotOnly Dev, a Health IT software incubator who describe themselves as a “not-only-for-profit” company. Earlier this year they released a Doctor Social Graph, […]
Sharing governmental information in open, accessible and structured formats could substantially increase transparency and accountability in public policy design and implementation. Furthermore, it enables broad social engagement in the process. Hence, opening data and acknowledging the demands of the population that arise from this is key to promoting social equality and effective public administration. Based […]
Loving this infographic, which explains and launches the Open Transport Data Manifesto: The Manifesto is the product of an ePSI workshop which took place in Helsinki in September in the run-up to OKFest, ‘Transport Data – fueling mobility of the future and smart cities’. 33 participants from 15 countries came together, to discuss the current […]
“The big problem in economics is that it really matters in which journals you publish, so the reputation factor is a big hindrance in getting open access journals up and going”. Can the accepted norms of scholarly publishing be successfully challenged? This quotation is a line from the correspondence about writing this blogpost for the […]
The most common argument in favor of open data is that it enhances transparency, and while the link may not always be causal, it is certainly true that both tend to go hand-in-hand. But there is another, more expansive perspective on open government data: that it is part of an effort to build public infrastructure. […]
This blog is cross-posted from the OKFN’s Open Economics blog Ever since BioMed Central (BMC) published its first free online article on July 19th 2000, the Open Access movement has made significant progress, so much so that many different stakeholders now see 100% Open Access to research as inevitable in the near future. Some are […]
This blog is cross-posted from the OKFN’s Open Economics blog A couple of weeks ago, I wrote the first part of the three part series on Open Data in Economics. Drawing upon examples from top research that focused on how providing information and data can help increase the quality of public service provision, the article […]
Where?: Guys Campus, Hodgkin Building, London, SE1 1UL When?: 21st-22md November Sign up: Please fill in the sign-up form Humanities Hack is the first Digital Humanities hack organised jointly by the Kings College London Department of Digital Humanities, DARIAH, the Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana (DM2E) project and our Open Humanities Working Group. The London event […]
Exciting news on open legislative data from the US. Eric Mills (from the Sunlight Foundation), Josh Tauberer (of GovTrack.us) and Derek Willis have been beavering away on a public domain scraper and dataset from THOMAS.gov, the official source for legislative information for the US Congress. They’ve just hit a key milestone – the incorporation of […]
This blog is cross-posted from the OKFN’s Open Economics blog Looking back on the Open Knowledge Festival 2012 in September, there’s an impression that openness is everywhere: There are working groups on Open Science and Open Linguistics, topic streams on Gender and Diversity in Openness, and events like Open Prom and Open Sauna. Open Knowledge […]
Students for Free Culture recently published two excellent pieces about why Creative Commons should drop their Non-Commercial and No-Derivatives license variants: Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 The Future of Creative Commons: Examining defenses of the NC and ND clauses As the first post says: Over the past several years, Creative […]
The following guest post is by Stef. The European Parliament is one of the most notoriously impenetrable institutions that governs our lives. Shining a light into the murky corridors of Brussels and Strasbourg becomes increasingly vital as the reach of the Parliament grows. Opening up the EU to greater citizen scrutiny will help to improve […]
Jonathan Van Parys of Where’s My Villo? fame got in touch to tell us about a nice little mini-project he’s just launched to coincide with the European Day of Languages, which is today: Launching on the 2012 European Day of Languages, languageknowledge.eu is a new website that visualizes language knowledge in Europe based on the […]
supported by The Open Economics Working Group is inviting PhD students and academics with relevant experience and research focus to participate in the first Open Economics Workshop, which would take place on December 17-18, 2012 in Cambridge, UK. The aim of the workshop is to build an understanding of the value of open data and […]
Open Street Map is probably the best example of a successful, community driven open data project. The project was started by Steve Coast in 2004 in response to his frustration with the Ordnance Survey’s restrictive licensing conditions. Steve presented on some of his early ‘mapping parties’ – where a small handful of friends would walk […]
Ignite Event in London This Thursday in London, Cleanweb UK invites you to their first Ignite evening, hosted by Forward Technology. Come along and see a great lineup of lightning talks, all about what’s happening with sustainability and the web in the UK. From clean clouds, to home energy, to climate visualisation, there will plenty […]
When: 19th-20th of September Where: Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Hämeentie 135 C Helsinki (Hack workshop 3) Welcome to two days of hacking for openness and sustainability at the OKFestival in Helsinki. This is an opportunity to meet great developers and sustainability experts and to help out our planet with some innovative […]
Over the weekend of 25th and 26th August, the second event in a series of ‘Development Data Challenges’ took place at the Guardian’s offices in London. What is a ‘Development Data Challenge’? Development Data Challenges are an interesting concept. They draw together a disparate group of people (we had development experts, coders, designers, data wranglers, […]
This is cross-posted from openbiblio.net. Following on from the success of the first JISC Open Bibliography project we have now completed a further year of development and advocacy as part of the JISC Discovery programme. Our stated aims at the beginning of the second year of development were to show our community (namely all those […]
Where Do Development Questions Meet Development Data? Where: The Guardian (Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1P 2AP) When: Saturday and Sunday, August 25-26 2012 This weekend in London, coders, designers, development experts, data wranglers and interested citizens and invited for the Development Data Challenge in London. Join us at the Guardian for a weekend […]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.