Open Data Now by Joel Gurin

Author:Joel Gurin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw Hill LLC
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Open Access: Transforming Scientific Publishing

The growth of Open Data online and the rise of a tech-savvy population open up unprecedented opportunities for scientific research and development. But the most basic scientific and technical information sharing is still done through published articles. There’s now a growing movement to make published research data free to all and accessible online in ways that would allow researchers to search across different but related articles to analyze their findings together.

In the research community, the push to Open Data has been known as Open Access—a movement to share data from all kinds of research more freely. The Open Access movement had been building for several years, but it was only a few years ago that several different efforts converged. As a result, we’re now moving in a direction where not only the results of research, but also the data behind the findings may become more rapidly available than ever before. The result will be new opportunities for open innovation, accelerated R&D, new publishing opportunities, and a more transparent scientific process.

The tragic hero of this movement was Aaron Swartz. For a week or two in January 2013, even people who only use the web for e-mail and shopping were engrossed in the story of this young Internet pioneer. Since 2011, the Department of Justice had been pursuing a case against Swartz for computer fraud and related charges. On January 11, 2013, Swartz hanged himself rather than face the risk of prosecution and imprisonment. The case sparked outrage against the Department of Justice and a call for new rules on access to data.

The story became a symbol not only of government overreach, but also of the contradictory and confusing rules that have determined how we define and regulate public data. When Swartz figured out how to make government legal documents available free of charge, his idea was validated and turned into an ongoing university-based project. When he tried to do the same thing for scientific research, he was prosecuted by the Department of Justice.

Back in 2008, Swartz, who already had a national reputation as both a web entrepreneur and Open Data activist, had decided to liberate data from PACER—the database run by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts that provides Public Access to Court Electronic Records. Swartz took advantage of PACER’s free trial to download 19,856,160 pages of documents, which reportedly would have cost him $1.5 million. He reposted them on a website he called RECAP (PACER spelled backwards). Perhaps predictably, PACER quickly discontinued its free trial policy. But RECAP went on to find a home at Princeton, which set up an easy-to-use website at www.recapthelaw.org.

Lawyers can use RECAP to make publicly available the documents that they’ve purchased through PACER. This is legal because PACER’s records, like all U.S. government documents, are free from copyright restrictions. (Government documents in the United Kingdom and some other countries, in contrast, are copyrighted.) PACER had charged users for the administrative costs of making records available; if the people who used them reposted the documents online, there was no additional cost to the government.

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