Open Data
Most open data are either datasets created by an organisation for a specific purpose (e.g. census data) and data resulting from academic research. Data from government organisations tend to have specific formats and supporting documentation that enable the data to be easily accessible and understandable. Academic research data on the other hand, is only now beginning to be required by funders and the standard of datasets produced by academic researchers vary in terms of quality and reproducibility.
“Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose.”
The main issue with open data is not the amount of available data, but whether the data is in a useable format with sufficient documentation to enable it to be beneficial or useful to anyone else.
At the University of Northampton all our researchers are required to create a dataset on completion of a research project that is stored within our institutional repository, Pure. Our research support staff work with our researchers to ensure that the data in the datasets is meaningful and in file formats that can be preserved and reused. Published datasets from the University of Northampton are stored in our Research Explorer.
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Geo-spatial and mapping data is available in open format from sources such as Open Street Map or the Ordnance Survey Open data products.
data.gov.uk is a searchable source of data published by central government, local authorities and public bodies. National archives, libraries, museums and heritage institutions are increasingly digitising their collections and making them freely available online.
re3data is a global registry of over two thousand research data repositories from a diverse range of academic disciplines, managed by DataCite. It provides information on repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers and can be browsed by multiple categories.
“a catch-all repository for European Commission funded research” hosted by CERN.
Figshare is a repository “where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner”
- Dryad
Dryad is “a curated resource that makes research data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of data types”.
GitHub is a vast, free repository of developmental software and code
An increasingly popular free open platform of deposited academic research. Search public projects to build on the work of others and find new collaborators.
You can use Mendeley Data to create and deposit datasets or search the harvested catalogue of 27 million datasets from domain-specific and cross-domain repositories. Provided by Elsevier and integrated with Pure.
Data Foundry, data collections from the National Library of Scotland, is an excellent example of open data made available in a variety of re-useable formats.