Late this August, California became a haven for proponents of data-sharing as the California Digital Library played host to the annual DataCite meeting in Berkeley. DataCite is a non-profit organization which aims to promote the sharing and re-use of research data by helping to provide tools to support a global infrastructure for data archiving, access, and citation. DataCite is composed [...]

Professor Stuart Shieber directs the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University. He is also a professor of computer science in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. As a strong open-access advocate, he has led a multi-year effort to shape Harvard’s policies in this arena.

We will continue to suffer from the simple inability to communicate our data if we do not both find means by which we can make legacy data accessible and move communities toward representations that are accessible to others.

Scientists should not expect government to solve our problems. We need to get our act together on our own. It’s our job, it’s our mission, it’s our chosen task. Our goal is to create, distribute, and preserve knowledge, and sharing data enhances all three.

Bio: Jeannette M. Wing is a computer science professor and department head at Carnegie Mellon University. She also is former assistant director for computer and information science and engineering at the NSF. She earned her Ph.D. in computer science at MIT. She serves on nine journal editorial boards, including the Journal of the ACM and the Communications of the ACM. [...]

A veritable orchestra of Earth-observation systems is intended to make reams of data available and relevant to decision-makers. At the summit last week of the Group on Earth. And GEO delegates embraced plans to funnel data from platforms tracking everything from biodiversity to earthquake risks into a free and open database.

NSF (October 1, 2010) – The National Science Foundation will soon require that grant applications contain a detailed plan explaining how researchers expect to publicly share the data generated by the agency’s funding. Applications without the newly required supplements, which can be up to two pages long, will be ineligible for funding.

Open access to our body of federally funded research, including not only published papers but also any supporting data and code, is imperative, not just for scientific progress but for the integrity of the research itself. We list below nine focus areas and recommendations for action.