Data-driven scholarship

(I’m afraid I’m going to bang on again about access to data). I’ve been at the CNI and the NSF/JISC meeting for which I wrote a position paper. The meeting was on Digital Repositories and Data-driven Scholarship (Science). My paper was meant to look at scale and complexity (and my internal presentation did this) but I also added stuff about how your couldn’t do data driven science if you couldn’t get the data.
The meeting was an invited group of library/informatics/CS/funders and covered science, humanities and infrastructure. I really enjoyed hearing of the challenges in classical studies – digital museums, the comple e-collection of cuneiform tablets and so on. The idea is for NSF and JISC (funding bodies) to prepare a strategy document for the next decade (we set ourselves the task of planning radically new support for making a major impact by 2015 – a grand challenge – we also know how fast the world is changing.) But part of that assumption is that all major knowledge will be digital by that time and will be freely accessible to everyone – not just academic subscribers. We see young people, retired people, people anywhere on the globe participating freely in this endeavour.
But the publishers are still copyrighting our data. I used to think this was a bureacratic oversight but it isn’t. The publishers now make no secret that they are taking our data from us and intending to resell it back to us. Although I make noise (on this blog, on the SPARC Open Data list, on Wikipedia) I don’t find any resonance. I’m told there are other people out there who care about Open Data but I don’t find a groundswell.
Readers, if we do not do something about this very soon we shall simply be owned by commercial and quasi-commercial publishing interests. The publishers are not stupid and they now know what the issues are.
I heard a story from one delegate from a major US laboratory where a major publisher had sent an inspection team on the assumption that there was too much use of their journals for the price they paid and then demanded very large amounts of money. No names, sorry. We are fairly close to some sort of warfare with publishers if things don’t change. If so, you’ll know where to find me.