Welcome to Our Favourite Social Science blogs.
As part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science 7th –16th March, Intute: Social Sciences is featuring a series of articles by our subject editors presenting their favourite blogs.
Today, Stuart MacDonald the Section Editor for Statistics and Data looks at blogs in the area of open data.
Blogs for Statistics and Data in the social sciences and beyond
The concept of ‘open data’ was introduced in 2003 by UNESCO. The National Science Foundation, OECD, Research Information Network, Joint Information Systems Committee, and the Office for Science and Innovation have subsequently published on a range of topics relating to access to publicly-funded research data.
In December 2007 the European Research Council published guidelines for open access (December 2007) whereby peer-reviewed publications and primary research data emanating from ERC funding have to be deposited in an appropriate research repository or curated database. This follows on from a number of other UK research funding council mandates relating to data deposition and sharing (e.g. Medical Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council).
Using this as the background I’m going to introduce and comment on a number of blogs (web logs) addressing open access and in some cases more specifically open data within and beyond the social sciences.
I use Netvibes which is an easy to use news aggregator suitable for viewing multiple blogs through a single interface.
Peter Suber is a Philosophy professor at Earlham College in the US, a Senior Researcher at SPARC, the Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge, and author of the Open Access News blog and SPARC Open Access Newsletter. His Open Access News blog is a great place to start for all things open access. It broadcasts digestible and informed chunks of news from across the globe on the subject. It also offers access to a weekly bulletin of articles going back to May 2002 which can be used to trace the evolution and development of open access trends, technologies and thoughts. The Web impact of open access social science research is an example of a highly newsworthy blog entry by Peter Suber.
Two other noteable blogs are Steve Harnard’s Open Access Evangelism and the Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog. Blog entries reflect the opinion of the respective authors. There is cross-over between the three blogs with differing perspectives however between them all that is newsworthy in the ‘open’ movement, including open data tends to be covered.
There’s also OA Librarian – a blog of Open Access resources by and for librarians.
There are a number of blogs which, whilst retaining the ethos of open access and open data, address statistics and numeric data more specifically, namely:
• Social Science Statistics Blog from the Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University
• IASSIST Communique – the blog of the International Association of Social Science Information Service and Technology which could be regarded as an unofficial professional organisation for data professionals within the Social Sciences
• Blog about Stats – an unofficial blog about official statistics dissemination maintained by Armin Grossenbacher Head of the Dissemination and Publication unit, Statistics Switzerland
• The Guardian’s Free Our Data: the blog who argue that “…by charging for data that is collected (sometimes with the force of law) by government-owned bodies, the government is holding back the growth in public and private use of that data which could benefit the UK overall.”
• OpenGeoData – which describes itself as a blog about open maps, geographical data and openstreetmap
• Tasty Data Goodies – the official weblog of Swivel
Luis Martinez, the Oxford University Digital Repositories Research Co-ordinator, has set up a blog to disseminate outputs and information about relevant activities in the converging domains of data curation, institutional repositories and e-Research and although in its infancy it may well be worth keeping an eye on.
Last, but by no means least there’s the DataShare Blog – the blog for the JISC-funded DISC-UK DataShare project which aims to investigate aspects of academic data sharing within institutional repositories, it also happens to be a project led by EDINA!
You can contribute to this event by leaving a comment on this article, perhaps letting us know about your favourite statistics and data / open access blogs or by helping expand our catalogue of academic blogs by filling in our suggest a site form.
For related Internet resources within Intute: Social Sciences try our Statistics and Data section.
Tags: Favourite Blogs
