Open Data At WWW 2007

polemic level AMBER
I am in Canada – can get internet but have some difficulty in sending email.
This post is quite a good way of letting everyone in the world know where I am…
I shall be talking on a panel here about Open Data. It is a very serious potential problem – I have blogged about it before. If you don’t do something about it you will wake up one morning and find that the publishers own your data as well as your free text. And that when you are reviewed for tenure, research assessment, etc.; and when this assessment also includes your data sources then you will be required to deposit your data in closed data repositories and choose those with the highest “impact factor”. Then the publishers will start to have control of the scientific process and will move on to the next phase.
But – it seems – few people are particularly worried about this. The sessions where I am talking about Open Data have a wide variety of motives – maps, personal data and science will come low on the agenda unitl scientists, librarians and provosts speak out.