Making Progress Toward Open Data Here in Mesa?



Here's a point of comparison to get a perspective on how this site approaches open data and how the City of Mesa has approached the same subject in the last two years.

Making Progress Toward Open Data:

Reflections on Data Sharing at PLOS ONE

For reference here's the most recent update on the City of Mesa's progress - or lack of - in the last two years presented at a Mesa City Council Session announcing the appointment of a new Administrator and a new contract for the Open Data Portal expected to be online in about six months after the current two-year contract, signed by City Manager Chris Brady in November 15, 2017 expired. A Leadership was created and there still figuring out how to do it >

   

Since its inception, PLOS has encouraged data sharing; our original data policy (2003 – March 2014) required authors to share data upon request after publication.
In line with PLOS’ ethos of open science and accelerating scientific progress, and in consultation with members of the wider scientific community, PLOS journals strengthened their data policy in March 2014 to further promote transparency and reproducibility.[1]
This move was viewed as controversial by many, particularly for PLOS ONE, the largest and most multidisciplinary journal to ever undertake such a mandate. In this post, we look at our experience so far.
In an effort to make data sharing a more integral part of publication and scientific output, PLOS’ data availability policy requires data underlying the results presented in papers to be fully available at time of publication, unless certain restrictions apply.

This is the opening image for Mesa's Open Data Portal?

Authors do not necessarily need to share entire primary datasets, but must share the underlying data used to create graphs, figures, and other analyses presented in the paper.






Each research article published by PLOS includes a Data Availability Statement (DAS) that describes the location of the data and, if needed, declares any restrictions on making the data publicly available (for example, in cases of limitations due to sensitive data, ethics committee decisions, or the terms of what clinical study participants consented, or did not consent, to release).     
This policy, while not always easy to implement, strengthens the scientific record in terms of reproducibility and integrity 
Link to original source: http://blogs.plos.org/everyone
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A few more excerpts:

In the period since the strengthened PLOS data policy was announced, the discussion has moved from whether authors should be required to share data to how the data can be most useful and whether authors are providing sufficient data. That’s progress. Other publishers are updating their data sharing policies and requiring a DAS, and funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust have implemented policies requiring that data from studies they support be made openly available, with as few restrictions as possible.
Government agencies including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), European Medical Association, European Commission and Research Council UK (RCUK) have implemented or are exploring policies that facilitate data sharing. In addition, academic institutions such as Cambridge University provide additional infrastructure and support for researchers to share data.

Most recently, the Wellcome Trust, HHMI, and NIH created the Open Science Prize to reward and make public the value of open, shared data.
In the PLOS Open Data Collection, we highlight papers that address issues of data sharing in various scientific disciplines and research showing a correlation between publicly available data and increased impact (for example, citation rates).
In a similar vein, the PLOS ONE 10-year Anniversary Datasets Collection highlights specific examples of well-reported or widely used datasets.