New Zealand Science and Open Access

In "An Information Revolution", David Penman discusses Open Access and Open Data (especially as applied to government-funded research) in general, and more specifically as applied to New Zealand science and scientists. While there is some good news:
"The Foundation for Research, Science and Technology is now reviewing its data policy and moving towards the norm for the OECD – greater open access for publicly-funded data. Rather than the research provider deciding on access, all information is openly and freely available unless restrictions such as national security, environmental damage (eg, the GPS co-ordinates of threatened species), or clear commercial disadvantage can be justified."

He has some blunt - and appropriate - words for NZ scientists:
Our researchers will also have to change. No longer can they sit with filing cabinets full of data waiting for the definitive experiment or the life time monograph. Publish quickly in electronic media, make your data and models freely available and get rewards from both publishing and showing that your data are being used by others – this should become the norm.
He also has an interesting view of the future of libraries, one that many libraries would be unwise to ignore:
Libraries are becoming available to all without leaving your home, information on your environment will become openly and freely available and communities will be able to use the internet to take more control of our institutions – a new style of democracy will emerge.
These comments are reminiscent of the meeting that was held in Wellington in 2003, described in Peter Davis' report "Saving and sharing research data: issues of policy and practice" where the relative vacuum in this area was also pointed-out:
"If New Zealand is to assess this international science trend and respond to it, a much more united scientific response is required, and also a “whole of government” approach. Not only the traditional science agencies, but also the National Library, Statistics New Zealand, even local government, all may need to contribute in some way and assist with a consensual and comprehensive solution."
Fortunately, there are other examples where New Zealand is moving ahead in this area: the recent (July 2007) announcement of a free data policy by the New Zealand National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA). Hopefully more like this will follow....

References

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Java, MySql increased performance with Huge Pages

[Resources updates: 2010.07.07 , 2009.11.03 , 2009.05.27 ] Long running, large memory, high performant applications often have special needs with respect to their memory management. On Linux, Solaris and other modern OSes, the translation look-aside buffer ( TLB ) - whose page size of 4k for many CPUs/OSes - becomes a scalability issue in these extreme conditions. In order to get around TLB scalability issues, huge page sizes are used to reduce the impact on performance. This can be of use to installations with large scale Java, MySql and other large memory applications. 300% improvement : " Well, in my case, I was able to achieve an over 3x improvement in my EJB 3 application, of which fully 60 to 70% of that was due to using large page memory with a 3.5GB heap. Now, a 3.5GB heap without the large memory pages didn't provide any benefit over smaller heaps without large pages. Besides the throughput improvements, I also noticed that GC frequency was cut down by two-third
Read more

Canadian Science Policy Conference

The Canadian Science Policy Conference is to held in Toronto, October 28-30, 2009. While the five themes , sub-panels and speakers looking both interesting and relevant, I am disappointed and perhaps a little alarmed that there appears to be no (explicit) mention of research data issues, research data management or research data archiving, despite the series of Canadian consultations examining these issues ( National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data (NCASRD) , 2004; National Data Archive Consultation Building Infrastructure for Access to and Preservation of Research Data , 2002; Data Access in Canada: Issues for Global Change Research” (Royal Society of Canada), 1996 ) and indicating the pressing need for 1) A research data archiving strategy and policy; 2) A research data archive. I think this is an issue that has too long been neglected (although there are some positive signs, like International Polar Year ), impacting Canadian science and innovation, especiall
Read more

Project Torngat: Building Large-Scale Semantic 'Maps of Science' with LuSql, Lucene, Semantic Vectors, R and Processing from Full-Text

Image
Project Torngat is a research project here at NRC - CISTI   [ Note that I am no longer at CISTI and that I am now continuing this work at Carleton University - GN 2010 04 07 ] that looks to use the full-text of journal articles to construct semantic journal maps for use in -- among other things -- projecting article search results onto the map to visualize the results and support interactive exploration and discovery of related articles, term and journals. Starting with 5.7 million full-text articles from 2200+ journals (mostly science, technology and medical (STM)), and using LuSql , Lucene , Semantic Vectors , R , and processing , a two dimensional mapping of a 512 dimension semantic space was created which revealed an excellent correspondence with the 23 human-created journal categories: Semantic Journal Space of 2231 Journals Scaled to Two Dimensions This initial work was initiated to find a technique that would scale, and follow-up work is looking at integrating t
Read more