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Goodbye Aaron Swartz – and Long Live Your Legacy
Aaron Swartz, coder, writer, archivist and activist, took his own life in New York on Friday. Aaron worked tirelessly to open up and maximise the societal impact of information in three areas which are central to our work at the Foundation: public domain cultural works, public sector information, and open access to publicly funded research. […]
Read more4 Ideas for Defending the Open Data Commons
The following post was written by Simon Chignard, author of L’Open data: Comprendre l’ouverture des données publiques. The post was originally posted on Simon’s blog following the launch of the Open Knowlege Foundation French national group, and has been translated by Samuel Goëta from OKFN France. ##Open data and the commons: an old story? There […]
Read moreDid Gale Cengage just liberate all of their public domain content? Sadly not…
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 […]
Read moreConsequences, risks and side-effects of the license module “non-commercial use only”
In 2012, a group of German copyright experts released in collaboration with Wikimedia the German document “Folgen, Risiken und Nebenwirkungen der Bedingung Nicht-Kommerziell – NC” (Consequences, Risks, and side-effects of the license module Non-Commercial – NC). In this document, they explain all consequences of choosing a CC license variant restricted to non- commercial use only […]
Read moreThe Year in Review: Top Stories from 2012
So it came and it went, and we seem to all have survived the End of the World. It’s been a big year, so as we bid it farewell and head full throttle into the very futuristic-sounding 2013, here’s a little review of the 5 most popular stories from the blog in the last twelve […]
Read moreOpen Data BC Summit – Call for Speakers
A little note on behalf of Nelson Lah, Chair of the Open Data Society of British Columbia, Canada. The Open Data Society of BC is hosting the BC Open Data Summit on February 19, 2013 in downtown Vancouver at SFU Segal Graduate School of Business at 500 Granville Street. We want you to be part […]
Read moreSeason’s Greetings from the Open Knowledge Foundation!
To celebrate the season our Public Domain Review project has put together a digest of festive public domain images and texts – including a selection of Christmas diary entries, a pictorial history of Santa Claus, and a beautiful book of snowflake illustrations. From all of us at the Open Knowledge Foundation, we wish you festive […]
Read moreWhat happened at the first Open Knowledge Foundation France meetup?
The following post was written by OKFN France edited by Pierre Chrzanowski and translated by Peter Schiøler. It was with great excitement that we greeted 60+ participants for the first OKFN meetup in Paris on the evening of 12/12/12. The meetup had a double objective; first to introduce the Open Knowledge Foundation in France […]
Read moreEconomics & Coordinating the Crowd
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 […]
Read morePrescribing Analytics: how drug data can save the NHS millions
Last week saw the launch of prescribinganalytics.com (covered in the Economist and elsewhere). At present it’s “just” a nice data visualisation of some interesting open data that show the NHS could potentially save millions from its drug budget. I say “just” because we’re in discussions with several NHS organizations about providing a richer, tailored, prescribing […]
Read moreFirst Open Economics International Workshop
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 […]
Read moreFor Australian Data Geeks, an OpenStreetMap Hackathon in Melbourne this January
Living in Australia? Local Group organisers in the region are organising an all-day hackathon on Saturday, January 5th 2013 from 10 am onwards to create an OpenStreetMap-based bicycle map of Melbourne, and they want you to get involved. The OKFN Australia Local Group will need data geeks, cartographers, programmers, graphic designers, sysadmins and most importantly […]
Read moreWhy the German Digital Library should learn from Europeana
The full version of this article is available on the Open GLAM blog. Launch of the DDB. Jill Cousins, Hermann Parzinger, Elke Harjes-Ecker, Matthias Harbort (from left to right) – Photo: Julia Hoppen On the 29th of November 2012, the beta version of the German Digital Library (DDB) was officially launched. After five years of […]
Read moreThe Public Domain Class of 2013
This is a cross-post from The Public Domain Review, a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Top Row (left to right): Stefan Zweig; Bronislaw Malinowski; Francis Younghusband Middle Row (left to right): L.M. Montgomery; A.E.Waite; Edith Stein; Robert Musil Bottom Row (left to right): Grant Wood; Bruno Schulz; Franz Boas; Eric Ravilious Pictured above is […]
Read moreResearch Data Management in Economic Journals
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 […]
Read moreThe Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter, December 2012
Well here in the northern hemisphere the days are drawing in and winter is upon us. Autumn’s been ace though, and as busy as ever! OKFest went better than we could have imagined, and we got so excited that we started planning next year’s event in Geneva before we’d even left Helsinki! We’ve also been […]
Read moreYour Timeline Submissions Wanted for the Open Book
The Finnish Institute in London and the Open Knowledge Foundation are publishing a book, and we want you to be a part of its history. The Open Book (publish date 2013, details here) is a crowd-sourced publication which will contextualise the international open knowledge movement in the words of those who are helping build it […]
Read moreShow me the (quality) data!
Show me your data! Put it online! Make it re-useable and accessible! That’s the rallying cry of many in the Open Data movement. Few, at this point, seem to be demanding: make sure your data is credible, robust and of high quality! Why is this important? It is true that there is value in making […]
Read moreLet’s defend Open Formats for Public Sector Information in Europe!
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 […]
Read moreLaunching the Open Sustainability Working Group
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 […]
Read moreOpenSpending CSO Workshop – Sarajevo
The full story from Sarajevo can be found on the Open Spending blog A while back, we wrote about the kickoff of our project to deliver the budget of Bosnia and Herzegovina to its citizens in a form they can understand. Last week in Sarajevo we had the kickoff workshop, bringing together a group of […]
Read moreFollowing Money and Influence in the EU: The Open Interests Europe Hackathon
This blog post is cross-posted from the Data-driven Journalism Blog. <img alt=”” src=”http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8199/8220416586_26ef2f90c6.jpg” style=”float: left;width: 250px;height: 375px;margin-left: 5px;margin-right: 5px” />Making sense of massive datasets that document the processes of lobbying and public procurement at European Union level is not an easy task. Yet a group of 25 journalists, developers, graphic designers and activists worked together […]
Read moreThe Open Knowledge Foundation Needs Your Support
We have never been so busy! Over the past 18 months we have been working with hacks and hackers, citizens and civil servants, students and scientists to open up knowledge which should be available for everyone. We want to enable as many people as possible to use this knowledge to improve the world. Just some of our highlights: […]
Read moreOpen Data and Privacy Concerns in Biomedical Research
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 […]
Read moreCOMMUNIA statement on open access to EU funded Horizon 2020 research
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, […]
Read moreAnnouncing: the Open Knowledge Foundation in France
The following guest post was co-authored by Samuel Goëta, Primavera De Filippi, Peter T Schiøler, Kat Borlongan, and Pierre Chrzanowski. Following the first ever Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki earlier this year, we, a group of Open Knowledge enthusiasts in France, have decided to start a national chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN). France […]
Read moreThe Myth of European Term of Protection Harmonisation
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 […]
Read moreThe Tamiflu story: Why we need access to all data from clinical trials
The BMJ Open Data Campaign has been attracting a lot of attention. Here Dr Tom Jefferson, one of the people whose attempts to provide reliable information on the anti-flu drug Tamiflu kicked the campaign off, tells the story of how we got here. We started working on a Cochrane review of neuraminidase inhibitors in 1998. […]
Read moreMore jobs at the OKFN – Apply now!
Following on from our recent announcement of seven new jobs at the Foundation, we’re really pleased to say we’ve got even more opportunities available! CKAN, the world’s leading open-source data portal platform, is looking to recruit full and part-time Python developers, so if you’re a Python web-developer who’d like to help build exciting open data […]
Read moreData Expeditions at MozFest
Expeditions into the Data Landscape: the School of Data goes to #MozFest. Find out what happened at MozFest – and see the tools and data sets to recreate it yourself! Saturday morning at MozFest. A sold out building, full of a thousand hackers, builders, makers, geeks, journalists, thinkers and more. And right at the top […]
Read moreMembers of the public asked to help tend Feynman’s Flowers
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 […]
Read moreUS Doctor Data to be “Open Eventually”
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, […]
Read moreWe are hiring!
We’ve just announced 7 job vacancies at the Foundation. If you’re passionate about open knowledge and want to help us build the tools and communities that will make a difference, then apply! We’re hiring for a number of different roles, some technical and some more community focused. More information on each of them can be […]
Read moreOpen Data Portal for Latin America
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 […]
Read moreThe Digital Public Library of America moving forward
A fuller version of this post is available on the Open GLAM blog The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an ambitious project to build a national digital library platform for the United States that will make the cultural and scientific record available, free to all Americans. Hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet […]
Read moreOpen Transport Data Manifesto
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 […]
Read moreData Bootcamps: Hands on data literacy workshops for the world
As governments around the world start implementing open data initiatives, establishing a critical public able to analyse and contextualise the data released is paramount. To facilitate this the African Media Initiative and the World Bank Institute started to collaborate on a program to bring Data Bootcamps to places with Open Government Data initiatives. Data itself […]
Read moreHurricane Sandy and open data
It is not an immediately obvious partnership, and yet open data and crisis response go together incredibly well. As storms have lashed the East coast of the US in recent days, causing tragic loss of life and enormous financial damage, many of the tools which have helped citizens to track its path and stay safe […]
Read moreReputation Factor in Economic Publishing
“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 […]
Read moreTowards a public digital infrastructure: why do governments have a responsibility to go open?
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. […]
Read moreReview of Open Access in Economics
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 […]
Read moreOKFestival 2012 One Month Later: Successes and Happy Tidings
For the past month since the last OKFestival 2012 pioneers departed from Helsinki’s misty shores, I’ve been wondering how to breach the topic of a “thank you” message to the remarkable community that made this highly experimental event, run on a shoestring budget with a crowdsourced programme, such a spectacular success for Finnish and international […]
Read moreHackathons: the How To Guide
Hackathons are a wonderful way to introduce people of all walks to the amazing possibilities of open data. Here in British Columbia we are fortunate to have a very active open data community which has organized and run 17 open data hackathons in the past two years. This year a few of us decided that […]
Read moreIs Open Access Open?
This post is cross-posted from Peter’s blog I’m going to ask questions. They are questions I don’t know the answers to – maybe I am ignorant in which case please comment with information, or maybe the “Open Access Community” doesn’t know the answers. Warning: I shall probably be criticized by some of the mainstream “OA […]
Read moreThe Data Bootcamp in Tanzania
This is a post from Michael Bauer a technologist, digital activist, and open data specialist with the Open Knowledge Foundation who is currently travelling around Tanzania and Ghana training people how to find, extract, and analyse public data. You can follow Michael’s travels in more detail on the School of Data Blog. I am on […]
Read moreThe future of Open Access
At the start of this week, which is Open Access week, we heard from Martin Weller about some of his fears for the future of Open Access. We’ve been collecting a few opinions from around the OKFN on the future of OA. Here’s a selection. What do you think? ###Ross Mounce: The future of publicly-funded […]
Read moreThe Benefits of Open Data (part II) – Impact on Economic Research
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 […]
Read moreThe great Open Access swindle
This week is Open Access week, and we’ll be running a few pieces mulling over where Open Access has got to, and where it’s going. Here Martin Weller discusses some reservations… The Cunning Thief, by Chocarne-Moreau. PD Just to be clear from the outset, I am an advocate for open access, and long ago took […]
Read moreHack4Health: London 2-4 November
In the first November weekend – 2-4 November – the UK Open Data Institute in London will host Hack4Health, organised by Coadec, Healthbox Accelerator, the Cabinet Office, NHS Hackday and the Open Knowledge Foundation. The event brings together entrepreneurs, developers and technical startups working on health and fitness data to create innovative solutions and products. […]
Read moreData Party: Tracking Europe’s Failed Banks
This blog is cross-posted from the OKFN’s Open Economics blog. This fall marked the five year anniversary of the collapse of UK-based Northern Rock in 2007. Since then an unknown number of European banks have collapsed under the weight over plummeting housing markets, financial mismanagement and other reasons. But how many European banks did actually […]
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