Zzzoot

It was very interesting to recently discover this Hansard exchange from the UK parliament dated Nov 12 2009 involving Open Source and sharing data: House of Commons Hansard Written Answers for 12 Nov 2009 Public Bodies: Databases Mr. Maude : To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office what steps her Department is taking to facilitate data sharing among public sector bodies. [299480] Angela E. Smith : The Ministry of Justice is the lead Department on data sharing. The Cabinet Office supports technical elements of secure data handling and ensures that considerations of Data Sharing informs our work to promote more joined up public services. Sharing data securely is a requirement of the Data Handling Review, which all public bodies must adhere to. Public Sector: ICT Mr. Maude: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office what assessment has been made of the levels of compliance with her Department's guidance on public sector open source software procurement; and what steps are being tak...

I recently discovered the (at least partial) root of some of the excellent activity in the area of research data management in the UK: the UK government's Science & innovation investment framework 2004-2014 . Of particular interest: 2.23 The growing UK research base must have ready and efficient access to information of all kinds – such as experimental data sets, journals, theses, conference proceedings and patents. This is the life blood of research and innovation [emphasis added] . Much of this type of information is now, and increasingly, in digital form. This is excellent for rapid access but presents a number of potential risks and challenges. For example, the digital information from the last 15 years is in various formats (versions of software and storage media) that are already obsolete or risk being so in the future. Digital information is also often transient in nature, especially when published formally or informally on websites; unless it is collected and archived...

International Study on the Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation , A joint report of The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (U.S.), The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC - U.K.), The Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project (Australia) and The SURFfoundation (Netherlands) . July 2008

As part of its DISC -UK DataShare project , JISC has released two documents: DISC-UK DataShare: State-of-the-Art Review , Harry Gibbs Data Sharing Continuum graphic , Robin Rice The former is a summary of recent projects and policy, and introduced me to a number of projects and initiatives that I hadn't previously known about. The latter is a well thought-out view of the data sharing continuum, showing us where we have been (and perhaps for some of us, still are!) and a good idea of where we will/should be going. A good graphic to show to a manager trying to understand the big picture.