My first few months as a Panton Fellow have flown by and so I wanted to provide a quick update on the work I’ve been doing. Whilst it’s not possible to discuss everything, I thought it would be good to list some of the larger projects I’ve been working on.

Early into the fellowship I made contact with two of the Open Economics Working Group coordinators, Velichka Dimitrova and Sander Van Der Waal, to discuss how best to encourage Open Data in economics. Whilst we thought that a data journal could be a good way of incentivising data sharing, we also thought it would be sensible to conduct a survey of economists and their data sharing habits to see if our assumptions were correct. This will give us some firm evidence of the best way to advocate for Open Data in economics. The results will be released when they are available.

Staying within the OKFN framework, I also helped kick-start the Open Humanities Group back into action in a meeting with the organisers and a post to the discussion list (posing the question: What does Open Humanities research data mean to you?). As a humanities researcher myself I am very keen to see the humanities embrace a more open approach to scholarship and it’s great to see a resurgence of activity here. So far this has resulted in a forthcoming Open Literature Sprint on January 25^th in London. This sprint will build upon some of the work already completed on the Open Literature and Textus projects for collaborating, analysing and sharing open access and public domain works of literature and philosophy. Whilst I cannot take any credit for organising the event, I will certainly be in attendance and I encourage all those interested in Open Humanities research/data to attend too. We are looking for coders, editors and textfinders for the event – absolutely no technical skills required! You can sign up to attend here.

However, the majority of my time has been spent working on a book: An Introduction to Open Research Data. This edited volume will feature chapters by Open Data experts in a range of academic disciplines, covering practical information on licensing, ethics, and information for data curators, alongside more theoretical issues surrounding the adoption of Open Data. As the book will be Open Access, each chapter will be able to standalone from the main volume so communities can host, distribute and remix the content that is relevant to them (the book will also be available in print). The table of contents is near enough finalised and the contributions are currently being written. I’m hoping the volume will be ready by August but watch this space! Do get in touch if you’ve any questions at all.

In addition, here is a round-up of the blogposts I’ve written so far:

On the Harvard Dataverse Network Project – an open-source tool for data sharing

What are the incentives for data sharing?

Panton Fellow Introduction: Samuel Moore