Freedom of Information and Research

Many of us will recall the so-called "climategate" scandal. While accusations that the researchers misleadingly manipulated data were found to be false, an inquiry did find that their "failure to accede to freedom of information requests" was questionable. Perhaps in response to this the UK JISC has recently released a QnA on Freedom of Information and research data. Definitely worth a read.

As Universities in Australia are statutory bodies they come under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI). So your research data and records might be requested! Some aspects of this are explained in the OAK Law report "Building the Infrastructure for Data Access and Reuse in Collaborative Research : An Analysis of the Legal Context". For Universities, there is generally a proper channel and process for FOI requests. So if you're a researcher and you receive a request for information that you're not happy to give out, it should be treated as a FOI request and the appropriate channels contacted immediately. There are exemptions in the Act including internal working documents, privacy information, in confidence material, and anything contrary to public interest. Requests might be refused if they unreasonably divert the organisation from normal operation. There also seems to be an exemption for incomplete research results where this could lead to an unreasonable disadvantage (patent, funding, publication perhaps). See section S34(4)(b) of the Victorian Government FOI Act.

JISC suggest that having a data management plan can help you track and maintain you research data, and ultimately archive or destroy any information appropriately. Having a good data management system is not only useful for long term data management and retrieval, but could also help facilitate a FOI request appropriately. Which data is relevant to the request? Are we the owners of the data or do we just hold a copy? Are there ethics, commercial, or privacy concerns around the data? Answers should be found in the contextual metadata of any well managed data management system.

References:

• Victorian Government FOI Act 1982
• Australian Federal Gov FOI FAQ
• Climategate scientists cleared by British inquiry

Can copyright protect data?

In a recent Australian court case Sensis/Telstra failed to protect their "copyright" on their best sellers [sarcasm] the White and Yellow Pages, the Australian telephone directory books. Justice Michelle Gordon is quoted as saying...

None of the works were original. None of the people said to be authors of the works exercised "independent intellectual effort" or sufficient effort of a literary nature" in creating the Works. Further, if necessary, the creation of the works did not involve some "creative spark" or the exercise of the requisite "skill and judgment". I accept that production of the directories is a large enterprise populated by many contributors (ignoring for the moment the determinative difficulties with authorship outlined above). ... However, these facts are not relevant to the Applicants' claim and... substantial labour and expense is not alone sufficient to establish originality.

A recent court case around television program guides also seems to supports this ruling. So what does this mean regarding factual databases or research data, particularly those collaboratively collected? You clearly still own the physical copy (the bits on a disk) but you might have to be careful about giving access! And if you don't care who copies it, full steam ahead!!!

source: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCA/2010/44.html

Social Bookmarking

Summary: Ma.gnolia is great!

I've been using del.icio.us for a while now and have found it an invaluable service. However, it really isn't a very collaborative tool, difficult to use in groups. You really need to set up an independent account for the group. "Networks" don't seem to amount to much other than bookmarks of other users. Tags such as "for:otheruser" can only be viewed by that other user.

I've also looked at Connotea and found it to have some nice features. For publications DC metadata can be automatically extracted from CrossRef. It seems to work well with DOI/Handle persistent identifiers. With "Groups" you can explicitly say certain bookmarks are for certain groups. Unfortunately, you can't say "publicly share this bookmark but not through my groups", so all of your public and unassigned bookmarks show up in all of your groups. I've posted to the developers to add this security option.

The availability of RSS feeds from these bookmarking sites is fantastic. Suddenly you bookmarks are machine readable and you can do all sorts of nice things with tagging. You bookmarks can become an ontology of mappings from concept (the bookmark entry in RSS) to resource (the linked resource). All very semantic and RDF-like. However, over time sites and CMS's changes and so do URL's. In connotea the URL cannot be changed, so this would be a problem. Connotea feeds refer to the Connotea website and not the resource URL directly. In Del.icio.us the link URL is the identifier for the RSS entry, so if you changed the URL it looks like you've got a completely new entry. We need a persistent identifier (or URL's) that can be used to identify the concept but redirect the URL to where it should go.

Only a little while ago I found Ma.gnolia and it looks like the solution I've been waiting for! What it has the others sometimes don't:

• Links directly to the URL
• Persistent identifiers regardless of bookmark URL changes (granted, it's a Ma.gnolia link)
  
• Much better collaborative/group tagging
• Access control with private tags, public tags, your tags in groups, and group tags not in your tags, private groups, publicly readable groups, publicly contributable groups
• ranking
• Atom, RSS, OPML, JSON, configurable microformats
• OpenID authentication
  
• Saved copies of websites (however, not publicly viewable)

The real problem now is that all of these solutions are not interoperable. Sure, I can import my bookmarks from one to the other, but there is no way I can use my Ma.gnolia account to contribute bookmarks to a Del.icio.us tag-set or a Connotea group.

The Open Movement

I've been doing some reading on the open movement trying to get to the root of what it's about. (There is some crazy talk out there.) In the process I found an interesting discussion on this very topic, the root of it. It's a blog posting entitled what is the open movement? The posting focuses around one of the general happiness drivers for humans beings, building things. The argument seems to address open-source and enabling humanity to improve tools for building things. However, if you consider content a tool for building better content then I guess the same argument holds for open-access.

By the way, I've started a del.icio.us tag for OpenMovement where you might find a lot of interesting links. The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing is a really interesting page on open-access.