The following notes are from a talk by Myron Gutmann of the ICPSR at the Charleston Conference. Gutmann talked about the long history of open data in the social sciences.

Open data wasn't invented yesterday: The Roper Center for public access to polling data opened in 1946. ICPSR founded in 1962. Research data sharing really took off in '60s with census data, major surveys, etc. In social sciences, large number of students & faculty build career on public data. This was made possible, in part, due to post-war and 1960s increase in funding for the social sciences.

"Putting People on the Map" report from National Academies of Science. How do we make sure social data is shared, public protected, public investment reaps value?

Social sciences benefit from the DDI Metadata Standard which defines an XML standard for open data sharing within social sciences.

What do you mean by data? Traditionally: closed-end survey results. Increasingly though questions are data? Actually this is a more "normal" way to approach the literative for a social scientist. Qualitative data? Video & Audio?

Minding our Knitting (or what social scientists can't lose focus on):

• curation matters


• The scientific authority of ICPSR is critical, and is established by reports that mention ICPSR as key infrastructure


• must protect the human subjects of research who are the basis of studies

What are the imperatives/challenges?

• Financial. Open data doesn't mean free data. Who owns the data? Costs of curation and preservation. Different funding models for data (e.g. membership, subscription, sponsorship)


• Protecting Confidentiality. All of the most interesting data has the potential for use in identifying individuals.


• Maintaining Provenance and Authority

"Preservation related transformations" must preserver provenance.

Open data is reality in social science.

Labels: "charleston conference", "open data", "social sciences"

As Charlie Rapple recently posted, I'm currently attending the XXVII Annual Charleston Conference. This morning I attended the key note presentations and wanted to share the notes I took during Clifford Lynch's presentation "Scholarly Literature as an Object of Computation: Implications for Libraries, Publishers, Authors".

Lynch opened by describing the need to take an expanded view of the scholarly literature, suggesting that forthcoming changes in how the literature is used and accessed with put strain on a number of arrangements within the industry, including areas such as service delivery, licensing, etc.

Lynch's main topic was the growing board of research and effort that surrounds computational access to the scholarly literature; in short analysing scholarly papers using text and data mining techniques. Lynch suggested that Google's PageRank was an early example of the power of this kind of analysis, and proposed that the time is very ripe for additional computational exploration of scientific texts. Lynch noted that the life sciences are particularly active in this area at the moment, largely because of the large commercial pay-offs in mining life science literature (think pharmaceutical industry).

When research conduct this research they often want to combine public literature with private research data (used as "leverage on the literature"), mixing it with other useful data sources, such as thesauri, geographical data, etc.

Lynch also noted that current content licensing agreements don't allow or support this kind of usage, and wondered how the legal and licensing frameworks needed to adapt to support it?

Lynch then moved on to discussing three key questions:

Firstly was "Where is the scientific corpus mined?". Lynch observed that there are "horrenous" problems with distributed computing scenarios, e.g. normalization, performance problems, cross-referencing and indexing across sites, and how to securely mix in private data.

Lynch felt that realistically (at least in near term), mining will be about computation on a local copy of the literature. How do we set things up so that people are able to do that? Lynch noted that institutions may need to consider their role in maintaining, building (and purging) these local copies of the literature. E.g. do they become owned and maintained as library services?

Lynch also noted that current hosting platforms don't make it easy to compile collections, although things are much easier with Open Access titles.

Lynch's second question was: "What is the legal status of text mining?". Lynch considered this to be a highly speculative area, with littel case law to draw on.

Lynch introduced the notion of "derivate works" under copyright law. Some derivatives can be mechanically produced (e.g. "first 5 pages"). Some derivatives, like translations involve some additional creativity. Summaries of works are not usually viewed as derivatives however, becoming the property of the summarizer. The current presumption, therefore, is that computationally produced content is derivative and so there are obvious issues for data mining.

Lynch suggested that we need to start being explicit about "making the world safe for text mining". By including special provisions in licenses for example.

As an aside, Lynch wondered what computation Google might be doing, or might be able to do, on the corpus its currently through various digitization efforts.

Lynch's third and final questions was "Do we need to change the nature of the literature to support computation?" E.g. by making it easier to analyze texts which are available as XML.

Lynch pointed to some useful underpinning thats are already under active research, e.g. efforts to analyze texts to identifying things, extracting references to people, places and organizations from the text. Lynch explained that these are major underpinning to more sophisticated analysis.

Adding microformats or subject specialist markup to documents would also help identify key entities in the text. Lynch wondered who would be responsible for doing this, the authors, or would it become a new value added service provided by publishers?

Labels: "charleston conference", "data mining"

Just a quick post for anyone who's going to be at the Charleston Conference next week: we'll be there, soaking up the information industry news and views (not to mention the southern sunshine). We'll be imparting our own share of wit and wisdom, with three of our representatives presenting during the conference. Here are the hot topics we're covering in our sessions:

"Authoritative? What's that? And who says?"
Thursday Concurrent Session 1, 4.15-5pm, Rutledge Room, Francis Marion Hotel
Our Chief Technology Officer (and AME blogger) Leigh Dodds is teaming up with Laura Cohen of the University at Albany, SUNY (and Library 2.0 blogger) to explore what defines "authoritative" in the age of user-generated content, and to assess the respective benefits of both Web 2.0 technologies and traditional publishing processes such as peer review. Anyone who has seen Leigh speak will, I am sure, vouch for the high-quality of both his presentation style and subject matter, and in this case I think he's come up with another fascinating new perspective on the changes in scholarly publishing being wrought by new technologies.

"Publisher Consolidation: Where Does It Leave Us?"
Friday Lively Lunch, 12.15-1.45pm, Colonial Ballroom, Francis Marion Hotel
Janet Fisher, Senior Publishing Consultant at our sibling company PCG, will moderate a discussion led by Margaret Landesman of University of Utah Libraries and Diane Scott-Lichter of The Endocrine Society. They will explore the driving forces, repercussions and potential responses to ongoing consolidation within the publishing industry. Given how publishers seem endlessly to be merging with one another, I think this too will be a pretty pertinent panel.

"Best practices: improving librarian administration interfaces"
Friday Concurrent Session 1, 2-2.50pm, Pinckney Room, Francis Marion Hotel
Ingenta's Director of Library Services Claire Winthrop will participate in a panel discussion seeking ways to reduce the learning curve required for librarians to familiarise themselves with multiple publisher and vendor interfaces, and at the same time increasing the amount of control that librarians have over their users' interaction with content. This session will see representatives of the "big three" in scholarly content hosting all together on the same speaking platform for the first time - Claire will be sharing the stage with Atypon's Chris Beckett and Dan Tonkery of EBSCO (owners of Metapress) - so there is a real opportunity for collaborative progress to be made.

"Librarians, aggregators, and publishers: Can we all live together?"
Friday Concurrent Session 3, 4.15-5pm, Room 227, Addlestone Library, College of Charleston
Janet Fisher will take to the floor for a second time, joining with Todd Spires from Bradley University and Kate Duff from University of Chicago Press to explore the benefits of journal databases and consider whether librarians' purchasing choices allow aggregated databases to co-exist happily alongside publishers' other distribution channels. This issue has been widely debated in a number of fora but often without hard facts to underline the supposition, so the research underpinning this session should make for some evidence-based discussion at last.

If you're not going to make it to the event, then hopefully Leigh Dodds will be posting regular reports on its progress on this very blog.

Labels: "charleston conference", "librarian interfaces", "library administration", "peer review", "publisher consolidation", "web 2.0", aggregators, libraries, publishers