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A protocol for IATI implementation by CSOs: your comments, please!

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The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) provides a standard to publish information on aid activities, and is intended to be used by (and useful for) all actors in development aid.

Interest is definitely growing and several organisations are investigating how to implement the standard. In several countries, national platforms of civil society organisations (CSOs) are engaging in discussions with their respective Ministries how to encourage and support implementation of IATI by CSOs. In the UK, DFID is even making IATI-compliant publication of data a condition for funding. Implementing IATI brings to the surface various issues that need to be addressed, some specific for CSOs.

Within IATI, a dedicated informal working group is discussing these implications for CSOs. This CSO Working Group has produced a Background Paper, attempting to provide a comprehensive overview of such issues, and to work towards ways forward.

DFID Open and Enhanced Access Policy Published at Long Last

DFID Open and Enhanced Access Policy Published at Long Last:

From November 1st, all recipients of DFID funded research must make their findings freely available.

[…]

Under the new policy, researchers will be required to make peer-reviewed journal articles open access through one of two routes: open access publishing (gold open access) or self-archiving (green open access).

The policy actually also extends to data sets, video, audio, images, and software, and contains some interesting citations to rationalise this choice.

It also is intended to give a boost to the DFID Research 4 Development (R4D) portal.

Free access to British scientific research within two years (The Guardian)

Free access to British scientific research within two years (The Guardian):

An important move for open access, but probably not the right one:

[…] research papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world.

[…]

British universities now pay around £200m a year in subscription fees to journal publishers, but under the new scheme, authors will pay “article processing charges” (APCs) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online. The typical APC is around £2,000 per article.

This is called “gold” open access, the revenue stream of publishers will change, but still be there. The alternative is “green” open access, where researchers make their papers available online after being accepted in journals, but without an alternative revenue stream.

  • Why not just organise the peer review amongst researchers? They do most of the work already, do publishers really add so much value?
  • It’s great that researchers from less priviliged organisations and countries will have access to more publications, but the threshold to get “indigineuous knowledge” published will only go up.
  • And not just that:

Another consequence of the shift could be a “rationing” of research papers from universities as competition for funds to publish papers intensifies. […] For example, a study that finds no beneficial effect of a drug might be seen as negative results and go unpublished […]

[…]

“The Finch committee’s recommendations look superficially as if they are supporting open access, but in reality they are strongly biased in favour of the interests of the publishing industry over the interests of UK research,” […]

“Open” should be about “commons”, not about vested interests or obsolete business models and organisations.

EU Opens Up Drug Data Secrets

EU Opens Up Drug Data Secrets:

via the European Public Sector Information Platform and Reuters:

Europe’s medicines regulator is opening its data vaults to systematic scrutiny in a move that will let independent researchers trawl through millions of pages of clinical trial information.

[…]

Such information is a treasure trove for scientists wanting to test drug company claims and potentially expose product deficiencies.

[…]

giving researchers access to raw data might one day open up new methods for treatment – perhaps using machine learning systems that could marry a patient’s health record directly to data from appropriate clinical trials.

[…]

Europe’s drugs watchdog, however, does not envisage a complete free-for-all for data, which would only be released after the agency has finished reviewing a new drug.

“We don’t want to be blind-sided by studies of poor quality that create a public health scare,” says Eichler. “What the debate now is about is finding the right conditions to minimise the potential for false findings.”

A Phone that Knows Where You’re Going

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A Phone that Knows Where You’re Going:

The potential of Big Data and why it is scary to have companies and governments collecting it…

In a study on 200 people willing to be tracked, the system was, on average, less than 20 meters off when it predicted where any given person would be 24 hours later.

Soon we’ll have an app that lets you select people from your social networks that you either want to “bump into” or rather “avoid” tomorrow, and it will advise you on your movements…