Open culture and the place of research
When we talk about ‘open’ culture, technology is often the first thing that comes to mind – open source projects like Linux, Libre Office or Mozilla’s Firefox. But ‘open’ is a much bigger movement than software and you’ll particularly hear it mentioned around data. Governments, for instance, are increasingly making data available to the community via sites such as data.gov.au. Making this data available serves a number of purposes. It increases transparency in government and allows people to verify what they’re being told. For instance, much of the data from the recent federal budget is now available for analysis. You mightn’t like what the government is doing, but access to the data means that you can check the numbers for yourself and should mean that the whole community can have a better informed debate.
But how does this relate to researchers? Like government data, a lot of the data collected by researchers in universities is ultimately funded by the public, which means that the same arguments around the public’s right to access apply. Publishing research data is about much more than ideology, however. By making their research data available along with their findings, researchers allow others in their field to verify their results and build on their work. Professor Matthew Todd, for instance, conducts essential research on malaria that extensively reuses data collected by other researchers. Allowing reuse of data means that the return on the resources invested in collecting it in the first place is increased. In fact, funding bodies are increasingly requiring publicly funded research to make the data available for reuse.
Listen to Dr Fiona Tweedie and Dr Maia Sauren of the Open Knowledge Foundation talk all things open with Byte Into IT on 3RRR (from 21 minutes).
Here at the Research Bazaar, we think a lot about how we can showcase the world-class research that happens here at Melbourne University, and how we can get researchers using the right tools to get the most out of data – whether they’ve collected it themselves or are reusing data collected previously. There will be more here on reuse of research data in the coming months, but for now you might like to check out HealthHack.
HealthHack was an event of the Open Knowledge Foundation that ran in Melbourne in October 2013. It will be on again in October 2014 nationally! Over the weekend, medical researchers with huge amounts of data came together with experts in data analysis and visualisation. The teams worked closely with the researchers to create tools that would not only be useful to the researchers but are open for use and adaptation by the broader research community.
Researchers all dream of a ‘world first’ and need to protect their work while it’s in progress. In some fields, such as medical research, patient confidentiality also means that whole datasets can’t simply be made freely available online. But increasingly we’re seeing that applying the principles of openness and encouraging reuse enables richer research, helps the funding dollar go further, and ultimately makes for better outcomes for the whole community.
