The last ESIS blog about how surprisingly few scientists are willing/able to share their experimental data, received an unexpectedly large interest. Directly after the publication another iMechanica blogger took the same theme but he put the focus on results produced at numerical analyses that are presented with insufficient information. While reading, my spontaneous guess was that one obstacle to do right could be the widespread use of commercial non-open codes. The least that then could be done is to demonstrate the ability of the code by comparing results with an exact solution of a simplified example. My fellow blogger also had an interesting reflection regarding differences between theoreticians and computational scientists and it suddenly occurs to me that everything is not black or white. Robert Hooke concealed his results and by writing an anagram, he made sure that he could still take the credit. He didn’t stop at that. When he made his result known he added some ten years to how early he understood the context. And he got away with it.
To some consolation, the EU 8th Framework programme, also called Horizon 2020, finances the OpenAIRE-, and its successor the OpenAIREplus-project that is developed and managed by CERN. The intention is to increase general access to research results with EU support. As a part of this the Zenodo server system was launched. As the observant reader of the previous blog might have seen noted, Zenodo was used by the authors of the survey we discussed in the previous ESIS blog
“Long term availability of raw experimental data in experimental fracture mechanics”, by Patrick Diehl, Ilyass Tabiai, Felix W. Baumann, Daniel Therriault and Martin Levesque, in Engineering Fracture Mechanics, 197 (2018) 21–26, with supplementary materials including all bibtex entries of the papers here
The purpose of Zenodo is to make sure that there will be enough storage capacity for open access data for everyone. Mandatory for all Horizon2020 financed projects and in first hand all EU financed projects.
I learn from the parallel blog that there are a DataVerse, an openKIM, a Jupyter project and probably much more, in the support of open-access. It seems to me that DataVerse covers the same functionality as Zenodo. In addition they offer an open-source server with the possibility to set up and run your own server and become integrated in a larger context, which seems very practical. OpenKIM is a systematic collection of atomistic potentials built by users. Jupyter Notebooks yet another open-source project supporting computing in any programming language. They have a written code of conduct. It is not as depressing as it first looks. In essence it summarises your rights and obligations.
It could possibly be better with one single repository or at least one unified system. But why not let a hundred flowers bloom. At the end the solution could be a search engine that covers all or a user’s choice of the open-access repositories.
Per Ståhle
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