Dictated to Arcturus
Tomorrow I shall be going to Berkeley to the Open Science Summit. I am creating some audio visual material which is somewhat unconventional and takes us back to the Bay Area of 50 years ago. I’ll say no more and leave it to be revealed at the occasion.
The purpose of my talk is to introduce the Open Knowledge Foundation to people who don’t know about it and who don’t know what its full potential its. As I have said earlier I think the OKF will become one of the great institutions of this decade. It does not intend to be universal but it intends to cover all aspects of knowledge where it is important to know what the degree of Openness is and how to manage it. The OKF has at least 50 different activities and divisions (some larger than others) in which interest groups (of course anyone is welcome) work together to define the knowledge structure and practice of a domain.
I am involved in several of these and have only a very short time to present both the OKF in general and my particular interests. So I am listing some of these here as a reference in case I cannot present the detail at the time. The projects that I am particularly interested in are:
- Open Data. This is now of enormous importance and almost every scientist that I encounter knows the importance of managing data. We have recently been awarded a grant by JISC in their “Managing Research Data” theme where we will be working closely on the methods of validating data before publication. We are delighted to be working with two major publishers (the International Union Of Crystallography, and Biomed Central) to see how we can prototype the complete lifecycle of data creation, validation, publication and archival.
- Open-bibliography. This is extremely exciting as well because bibliography is key to our management and navigation of the scientific literature. Again we have been funded by JISC and are working with the IUCr and with PLoS. [both of this and the previous project are run in very close collaboration with David shotton at Oxford. We hope that these projects will be auto catalytic and act as nuclear round which other like minded people and organizations can congregate. As a result we hope to change the way in which science is published and its outputs are managed.] We see this as the first step in Reclaiming Our Scholarship from the non-accountable organizations who currently manage scientific publication metadata. Here I will hope to interest some of the audience in joining this revolutionary activity.
- Open theses. The dissemination of electronic theses and dissertations is poorly managed for the 21st century (concentrating far more on preserving the past than disseminating the current and future). In this project we hope to be able to coordinate access to theses and to provide a global approach to finding information. The information is of course not just textual but also graphical, chemical, numeric and many of the other scientific data types that are not catered for by the major world search engines. Again this is a project where we hope that many people and organizations will help to provide local and global material for the project and I’ll be expanding more later.
I’ll really only have time to mention these three topics and then to spend a small amount of time on open data which is probably the most important for the open science summit.
Summarising, the OKF does not intend to do everything but is likely to be the best place to look when you need to explore some aspects of openness the discussions on the list are often extremely high quality with great technical expertise in many fields and political there are of course many from the academic library but also many from other walks of life.