Sharing data sets of public and private information will become mandatory in Dubai. A bill in this regard will be made into law later this year.

With the exception of private, restricted and classified data and information that threatens national security, all data must be made available in public domains, officials said on Monday. The data will be made available in a centralised platform such as federal websites, or a decentralised manner like in the websites of various government entities, depending on the volume and size of data available. Open data is government, private or individual data that is shared internally or among various sectors partially or completely without restrictions.

Abdullah Madani, Chairman of Dubai Open Data Committee formed on scientific information (journal articles, conference papers and datasets of various kinds) emanating from publicly funded research. Working with partners, UNESCO works to improve awareness about the benefits of OA among policy makers, researchers and knowledge managers. Through its global network of Field Offices, Institutes and Centers, UNESCO facilitates the development and adoption of OA-enabling policies. In addition, UNESCO engages in global OA debates and cooperates with local, regional and global initiatives in support of OA.

Source communication in December 2014 to ensure that open access data is readily available for Dubai residents, said: “The committee is outlining a strategy for Dubai’s open data policy. After the required research has been done, we will propose a bill on implementing open data and provide an action plan for enforcing it in coordination with all parties concerned.

Madani added that as of now the committee is focusing on amassing large quantities of data and streamlining that data based on quality. Committee members are hoping that stakeholders with access to data will voluntarily submit their data sets for presentation.

Sorce: Khaleej Times

Canada’s three largest government-funding agencies have released joint guidelines effective May 1, 2015, to ensure open-access publication of the research they support.

Entitled the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications, the guidelines require that all peer-reviewed publicly funded research be made freely available online within 12 months of publication.

The policy includes research supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

“We applaud the Tri-Agency for adopting these guidelines,” says University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, Gwen Bird. “They will significantly increase access to Canadian-funded research publications and data and enable Canadians and researchers worldwide to use and build on this information.

“SFU librarians already work closely with scholars to make their research available through open access, so we’re well-equipped to assist faculty, researchers and students in meeting the new policy.”

SFU researchers funded by any of the three agencies can meet the required guidelines in one of two ways:

Publish in a journal that allows open access within 12 months of initial publication.

Deposit the final, peer-reviewed author version of the article in an online open-access repository such as Summit, the SFU research repository.

The library-administered SFU Central Open Access Fund covers article-processing charges for SFU authors including faculty, staff and graduate students who publish in eligible open-access publications and do not have grant funds available to cover the fees.

The library also has memberships or invoicing arrangements with prominent open- access publishers including BioMed Central, Hindawi Publishing, Public Library of Science, SAGE Open and Springer Open. Eligible authors who submit an article to any of these publishers can arrange direct payment of their article processing charges by the library.

Open-access publications are free to read on the Internet and can be downloaded, copied and distributed as long as credit is given to the authors. Readers do not require a subscription or any form of payment, either personally or through the University or library.

Sorce: SFU News

The Global Open Data Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels.

The UK tops the 2014 Index retaining its pole position with an overall score of 96%, closely followed by Denmark and then France at number 3 up from 12th last year. Finland comes in 4th while Australia and New Zealand share the 5th place. Impressive results were seen from India at #10 (up from #27) and Latin American countries like Colombia and Uruguay who came in joint 12th .

Map legend: green= highest score and red= lowest score

The Sierra Leone, Mali, Haiti and Guinea rank lowest of the countries assessed, but there are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society.

Overall, whilst there is meaningful improvement in the number of open datasets (from 87 to 105), the percentage of open datasets across all the surveyed countries remained low at only 11%.

Even amongst the leaders on open government data there is still room for improvement: the US and Germany, for example, do not provide a consolidated, open register of corporations. There was also a disappointing degree of openness around the details of government spending with most countries either failing to provide information at all or limiting the information available – only two countries out of 97 (the UK andGreece) got full marks here. This is noteworthy as in a period of sluggish growth and continuing austerity in many countries, giving citizens and businesses free and open access to this sort of data would seem to be an effective means of saving money and improving government efficiency.

Sorce: Open Knowledge Foundation

Statement from the Nature Publishing Groups (NPG) reads, ‘all research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded.’ This NPG content sharing policy affects 48 journals in Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group division. This policy gives readers free (read-only) access to major journals including Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics. By disallowing coping, downloading and printing, NPG preserves its major source of revenue which is subscription fees from libraries and individuals.

The Nature Publishing Group will be using ReadCube to display the PDF files of those journals. Through ReadCube, institutions get access to all articles published by NPG since 1869. Individuals, though, will be able to read articles published since1997.

Open access movement and awareness are growing. Many countries and institutions are mandating researchers to publish their research output on open access platforms. This NPG policy comes as a result of growing pressure on major publishers like NPG which are founded on subscription based publishing model. Even before NPG announced this measure, it has made 38% of its articles open access through Gold Open Access model.

The measure taken by NPG has created mixed reactions. Most open access advocates appreciates the move. Nonetheless, they believe that NPG fall short on major issues such as giving access to coping and downloading- which are major parameters of genuine open access publishing. Critics of the policy think that NPG has adopted this policy from public relations perspective, not from true intensions of embracing open access publishing model. sourceNature