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Version Variation Visualisation
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) […]
Read moreWe Need an Open Database of Clinical Trials
The award winning science writer and physician Ben Goldacre recently launched a major campaign to open up the results of clinical trials. The AllTrials initiative calls for all clinical trials to be reported and for the “full methods and the results” of each trial to be published. Currently negative results are poorly recorded and positive […]
Read moreThe Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter, February 2013
Sign up here to receive the Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter into your inbox every couple of months. We’re fresh back from our biannual summit, which brought together members from Open Knowledge Foundation Local Groups and Working Groups around the world. It was truly inspiring to hear about the vision and dedication of people in so […]
Read moreYet Another Open Access Inquiry
Hot on the heels of the recent House of Lords inquiry, there is also a separate Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Committee inquiry into the new Research Councils UK open access mandate focusing on economic aspects. There were only 70 or so written evidence submissions to the House of Lords inquiry and few were from active researchers. Other […]
Read moreUS government to release open data using OKF’s CKAN platform
You may have seen hints of it before, but the US government data portal, data.gov, has just announced officially that its next iteration – “data.gov 2.0” – will incorporate CKAN, the open-source data management system whose development is led and co-ordinated by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The OKF itself is one of the organisations helping […]
Read moreDutch PhD-workshop on research design, open access and open data
This blog post is written by Esther Hoorn, Copyright Librarian, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. It is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog. If Roald Dahl were still alive, he would certainly be tempted to write a book about the Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel. For not only did he make up the research data […]
Read moreSovereign Credit Risk: An Open Database
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 […]
Read moreWinter Updates from Belgium
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 […]
Read moreFirst #OpenDataEDB of 2013
The Edinburgh Open Data community started the year in fine style with a meet-up hosted by the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge. The turn-out was excellent, with a wide range of participants. As usual, we had a number of lightening talks. The meet-up started with a welcome from Darryl Mead, Deputy National […]
Read moreCitizen Science Open Technical Workshop – tomorrow
It’s our pleasure to invite you to join the Citizen Science Open Technical Workshop to be held Wednesday 30th January 16:00 CET virtually using Google Hangout. You can attend the meeting and send all your comments in this Youtube channel or this twitter account. Over 2 hours, we’ll have expert talks and open discussions about […]
Read moreBioMed Central Open Data Awards
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 […]
Read moreVice Italy interview with the editor of the Public Domain Review
The editor of The Public Domain Review, Adam Green, recently gave a feature-length interview to Vice magazine Italy. You can find the original in Italian here, and an English version below! While there is a wealth of copyright-free material available online, The Public Domain Review is carving out a niche as strongly curated website with […]
Read moreFirst Open Economics International Workshop Recap
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 […]
Read moreOne Graduate Student’s Commitment to Open Knowledge
The following post was originally published on Alex Leavitt’s website. Fed Up I have been a PhD student for less than two years. On the other hand, for six years, I have been a member of the free culture movement, which emphasizes the importance of access to and openness of technology and information. Recently, […]
Read moreHelp Us to Cultivate the Digital Commons!
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 […]
Read moreAndrew Stott joins OKFN Advisory Board
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 […]
Read moreBoundless Releases All Its Textbooks Under Open License
News just in that Boundless, the open source digital textbook provider, is releasing all of its 18 open source textbooks under a Creative Commons Attribution and Share-Alike license. We covered the progress of this brilliant initiative mid-way through last year. Boundless leverages open content on the web, whether that’s information on Wikipedia or digital copies […]
Read moreOpen Data Day 2013
Saturday 23rd February is Open Data Day 2013! Open Data Day is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption of open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments. […]
Read moreCitizen Science Can Produce Reliable Data
The following piece is cross-posted from The Conversation. Citizen science occurs when data for scientific research is collected by members of the public in a voluntary capacity. Public participation in environmental projects, in particular, has been described as a global phenomenon. But there is a stigma associated with these types of projects. The data collected […]
Read moreExploring the 2012 Open Budget Survey
How transparent and accountable are different countries’ national budgets? Every two years, the International Budget Partnership (IBP) runs the Open Budget Survey to try to answer this question, by measuring the budgets of over 100 countries against a wide range of openness standards. The results for 2012 are released today, with an interactive data explorer […]
Read moreNew Open Access Initiative Started by Mathematicians
Last week Tim Gowers, Cambridge University mathematician and open access advocate who led the recent boycott of Elsevier, announced an exciting new open access initiative for mathematicians on his blog. The project, called the Episciences Project, will make it super quick and easy to set up open access journals called “epijournals”. Epijournals are electronic journals […]
Read moreePSI Open Data Days, Warsaw, February 21-23
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?: […]
Read moreMy Environment App Competition
Natural England, in partnership with the Environment Agency, is launching a new web-portal service called My Environment. To celebrate its launch, My Environment is running an Apps competition. From the announcement: Could you create an app that will appeal to mobile device users and help them to engage with nature? The app that best helps […]
Read moreDigital Public Library of America recommends CC0
The following post is cross-posted from the OpenGLAM blog. On the OpenGLAM blog we have previously written about the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), an initiative that has the goal to make the cultural and scientific heritage of humanity available, free of charge, to all. To achieve this goal the board of directors has […]
Read moreCommunia condemns the privatisation of the Public Domain by the BnF
Last week the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) concluded two new agreements with private companies to digitze over 70.000 old books, 200.000 sound recordings and other documents belonging (either partially or as a whole) to the public domain. While these public private partnerships enable the digitization of these works they also contain 10-year exclusive agreements […]
Read more“Carbon dioxide data is not on the world’s dashboard” says Hans Rosling
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 […]
Read moreSita’s free: Landmark copyleft animated film is now licensed CC0
This past Friday, American cartoonist, animator, and free culture activist Nina Paley announced she was releasing her landmark animated film Sita Sings the Blues under a Creative Commons CC0 license. Sita Sings the Blues is quite possibly the most famous animated film to be released under an open license. The 82 minute film, which is an autobiographical story […]
Read moreUrban Data Challenge
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 […]
Read moreOKFestival 2012: Official After Package Released
A Week to Remember After a few months of post-production work by the core crew and our ever-amazing organising partners, we are happy to release the official OKFest 2012 After package – a set of materials that commemorate what an amazing week we had with you in Helsinki and help set the scene for what’s […]
Read moreThe House of Lords on Open Access
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 […]
Read moreWikimedia Launches Open Travel Guide
The Wikimedia Foundation has just announced its newest project, Wikivoyage, a free, online travel guide that anyone can edit. Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said of the launch: “There’s a huge global demand for travel information, but very few sources are both comprehensive and non-commercial. That’s about to change,” said Sue Gardner, […]
Read moreOpen Research Data Handbook Sprint – 15-16 February
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 […]
Read moreContent as Data: Towards Open Digital Publishing with Substance
I’m the maintainer of Substance, an open software platform for collaborative composition and sharing of digital documents. In this little essay, I’d like to sketch the challenges that modern publishing systems face today. I’d also like to come up with ideas for how the complexity can be handled with the help of specialized user-driven software. […]
Read moreThe Statistical Memory of Brazil
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 […]
Read moreGoodbye 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 […]
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.