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26 news posts in Open data

Open science and peer review

06 Mar 2017

160-million Papers and Counting: The World’s Information Deluge

Academic output has exploded over the last 100 years but how can the most relevant research be found? — by Melissa Cochrane In 2009, it’s estimated there were at least 50 million research publications floating around the coves of the internet. If you printed all of them out and put them side by side, you could go all the way around the earth. Based on the recent data, however, it appears the number of publications are at least 3 times larger than previously thought, at around 160 million, and the growth rate has increased to 0.8% per month, doubling in just over 7 years. It’s clear that the scientific world is booming with information, but how do researchers find out who, what and where is relevant to their specific fields? How on earth can we navigate all this? Kicked off two years ago, Microsoft Academic is a research project inside Microsoft Research. At its core is an artificial intelligence agent that reads all academic publications on the web to learn and automatically create a massive knowledge base, going far beyond a simple keyword-matching search to provide an overall benchmark and the context of what you’re looking for. A goal of […]

Life sciences

06 Mar 2017

In politics, does rudeness win?

A new research project wants to track if our politics is getting ruder or whether it’s the media – stupid! — Tanya Petersen “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!” This is how US President, Donald Trump kicked off the new year – a welcome to 2017 tweet with an obvious dig. Was this rude or perhaps just churlish? While a fascinating new research project about to get underway at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne won’t be studying in detail the political musings of Donald Trump it will be trying to assess whether our politics has become ruder over time. And to do this research open data is key. Led by Dr Robert West and graduate student, Seth Vanderwiltthe, the project will start by looking at the US congressional records – an un-sampled record of what people say in a certain environment. Dr West says these are the prime example of open data. They are records that have existed from the beginning, they have always been public and now they are digitally available for researchers. […]

Frontiers news

11 Jan 2017

Frontiers position statement: Impact of EU copyright reform on open science and innovation

To innovate effectively, the results of research must be open to all of society.  Today, there is exponential growth in the knowledge produced by scientific, medical and technical research, and new tools are being developed that can exploit these data in powerful ways. One of the most promising of these tools is text and data mining (TDM), i.e., the automated computational analysis of digital content.  The European Commission recognises the potential of TDM and is currently considering updating and clarifying the legal provisions for its use. Frontiers, as well as the other signatories of the attached position statement, urge European legislators to support a copyright exception that clearly includes all research bodies (i.e. businesses and SMEs, as well as universities, institutions and citizen scientists) which have lawful access to the digital content. The use of TDM should be made as broad and explicitly unrestricted as possible so as to benefit European society by accelerating scientific progress, innovation and economic growth. The full Statement is provided below and can be accessed as a PDF.  We are pleased that, to date, the following open-science stakeholders have agreed to sign in support of the Statement: Frontiers (Frederick Fenter, Executive Editor) ContentMine (Peter Murray-Rust, Director) Electronic Information for Libraries (Teresa Hackett, Copyright and Libraries Programme Manager) eLife (Mark […]

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