[open-science] Mention of scientific data in European Commission communication on open data

Egon Willighagen egon.willighagen at gmail.com
Tue Dec 13 06:58:16 UTC 2011


On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 4:02 AM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:
> And another mention a bit later:
>
> "Open data for science   * Communication and Recommendation to the
> Member States on scientific information, early 2012;   * Expansion of
> the open access pilot for scientific publications to the whole of
> Horizon 2020 + pilot with open access to research data."
> I like the way they've adopted the "open data for science" language,
> which is much more specific that "access to scientific information".
> The Horizon 2020 pilot sounds interesting...

Dunno about all this... sounds good, but I'm rather skeptic... all
this has too much room for, umm, interpretation... first of all, no
one really knows what open access is (!= Open Data!) ... nor what data
should be made available. Is it is enough that your figures in
publications become open access? What do we win with that...

That aside... seriously... a pilot in 2020? Really, this sounds like a
Kyoto treaty...

If the EC is serious, they should make EU-important science open, like
REACH. But all that included third-party data, which is excluded from
this press release... so, where it would actually have an impact,
toxicology/health care, nothing changes at all. On the Dutch
tweakers.net forum, someone correctly noted that many national
governmental organisations have third-parties perform studies
nowadays... all that is excluded too.

So, that leaves Open Data that governments are already making
available by themselves, and to me (please proof me wrong) it seems
that the EC is sticking a feather up their, ummm,,, hats, with
something already done by others (governments, EU projects, Open
Scientists, universities, etc).

(Please, tell me I am seeing this all too pessimistic... )

Egon

-- 
Dr E.L. Willighagen
Postdoctoral Researcher
Institutet för miljömedicin
Karolinska Institutet (http://ki.se/imm)
Homepage: http://egonw.github.com/
LinkedIn: http://se.linkedin.com/in/egonw
Blog: http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/
PubList: http://www.citeulike.org/user/egonw/tag/papers




More information about the open-science mailing list