Europeana is an online library endorsed by the European Commission, for millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe. Europeana has recently opened its dataset of over 20 million cultural objects for free re-use under the Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication meaning that anyone can use the data for any purpose - creative, educational, commercial - with no restrictions.

Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission with responsibility for the Digital Agenda for Europe, said: "Open data is such a powerful idea, and Europeana is such a cultural asset, that only good things can result from the marriage of the two. People often speak about closing the digital divide and opening up culture to new audiences but very few can claim such a big contribution to those efforts as Europeana's shift to creative commons." Europeana's huge cultural dataset opens for re-use , Press Release - The Hague, 12 September 2012

Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Database for Autism Research (NDAR) is a research data repository helping accelerate scientific discovery in autism research.

NDAR provides the infrastructure to store, search across, and analyse various types of data. In addition, NDAR provides longitudinal storage of a research participant's information generated by one or more research studies.

In other words, NDAR is able to associate a single research participant's genetic, imaging, clinical assessment and other information even if the data were collected at different locations or through different studies.

By doing so, NDAR gives researchers access to more data than they can collect on their own and provides robust tools to analyse the information, making it easier and faster for researchers to gather, evaluate, and share autism research information from a variety of sources.

Generally, NDAR provides the following capabilities:
• Standards to enable cross site meta-analysis and data comparisons across bioinformatics systems.
• Deployment of useful bioinformatics tools for researcher use.
• Promotion of the sharing of quality research data with autism research community.
• Query access to a repository of phenotypic, genomic, imaging and pedigree research data.

The latest Australian National Data Service (ANDS) newsletter is now available. This issue examines research data from the perspective of researchers.

Including:

• International partnerships.
• Enabling new and efficient research.
• Big data.
• International engagement.
• Up and coming events.

The European Commission's recent announcement on access to scientific data specifically mentions not only scientists and research institutions, but also members of the public as potential users of scientific data.
Jonathon Gray from the Open Knowledge Foundation writes: While the benefits of open scientific data for scientists and research institutions are reasonably well documented - the Human Genome Project is probably the best known exemplar - one wonders what innovations we might see from non-experts and non-scientists, and what more open policies might mean for the public understanding of science.
Read the full article here.

Christine Borgman, of the UCLA Department of Information Studies, has written an interesting in-depth discussion paper on "the conundrum of sharing research data":

Researchers are producing an unprecedented deluge of data by using new methods and instrumentation. Others may wish to mine these data for new discoveries and innovations. However, research data are not readily available as sharing is common in only a few fields such as astronomy and genomics. Data sharing practices in other fields vary widely. Moreover, research data take many forms, are handled in many ways, using many approaches, and often are difficult to interpret once removed from their initial context. Data sharing is thus a conundrum. Four rationales for sharing data are examined, drawing examples from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities: (1) to reproduce or to verify research, (2) to make results of publicly funded research available to the public, (3) to enable others to ask new questions of extant data, and (4) to advance the state of research and innovation. These rationales differ by the arguments for sharing, by beneficiaries, and by the motivations and incentives of the many stakeholders involved. The challenges are to understand which data might be shared, by whom, with whom, under what conditions, why, and to what effects. Answers will inform data policy and practice.

Borgman, C. L. (2012), The conundrum of sharing research data. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci., 63: 1059-1078. doi: 10.1002/asi.22634

View Full Article in HTML or Download the PDF

With the current global emphasis on sharing research data with the public, you might wonder - what can the public actually do with data? How can they access it, understand it, or apply it? Why might it be of interest to them, or you?

The term 'data' refers to an item of information, or, items of information considered collectively for reference or analysis (OED). 'Data' applies across disciplines and could refer to statistics on the publication of comic books, DNA sequencing or, marine life in the Arctic - it can refer to countless sets of information.

The purpose of this post then is to enlighten readers about interesting and engaging ways that data are currently being presented and utilised on the web to inform the public about current issues, and other information available to them. For starters, did you know that everyone contributes to the growing wealth of digital data, whether you work in research or not? Take a look at this infographic from Mashable - every owner of a mobile phone, email address or iTunes account produces data in the digital age. You can also check out the impact of real-time tweets across the world via A World of Tweets.

The UK's newspaper The Guardian frequently experiments with public data and uses it to support current news stories. It has a dedicated 'Datablog' with the sole purpose of transforming data into useful and easily understandable formats about key issues important to the UK and globally. Some examples include: Water leakages: which company is the worst?; The world's top 100 airports: listed, ranked and mapped; Freedom of Information request 2011: how many were there and which ones were turned down?; or What does 15 years of baby name data tell us about modern Britain?.
The Guardian sites all sources of data and makes data freely available to every reader.

Other sites and services, and particularly research centers, make data available for download to use in your own way, or create visual representations for the reader or researcher. Visualisation and infographics are the terms generally used to describe this process and there are many tools available online that allow you to work with data in this way. A few examples of such tools include: Piktochart, Gephi, Tableau public and Taxgedo.

So where can you get public data?

Apart from researchers being increasingly required to share data, many governments are also opening up data for the public (see http://data.gov.uk, http://www.data.gov/ and http://data.gov.au). You can also try datacatalogs.org - a list of open data throughout the world; The Data Hub - where you can find, share and collaborate on data; Google Public Data; or, Freebase. But there are many places to acquire data if you do a simple online search or investigate your University's academic research centers and faculty websites.

Who is talking about data in the public realm?

Beyond the academic sphere, there are large communities online discussing data and its use in the public, as well as foundations geared towards data investigation. For example, the Knight Foundation in the US has organised the Civic Data Challenge whereby citizens of the US (aged thirteen and above) are invited to access, analyse, interpret and visualise data from Civic Health CPS datasets. In addition, there are many interested individuals proactively investigating, sharing and blogging about data. Here are a few sites worth checking and some blogs worth following: Visual.ly; Well-formed Data; Daily Infographic; Visualising Data; Visualising.org; The Guardian's Datablog; and a personal favourite - Information is Beautiful.

In this video, David McCandless of Information is Beautiful illustrates the importance (and perhaps playfulness) of contextualising research data and information through creative visual means.