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 >
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.
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| This is the opening image for Mesa's Open Data Portal? |
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:
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.
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.
