US Government Plan to Open All Scientific Data
An article in the March 22, 2007 issue of Nature reports that a plan is underway to make raw scientific data from federal agencies available in an open access repository.
"The US government is considering a massive plan to store almost all scientific data generated by federal agencies in publicly accessible digital repositories. The aim is for the kind of data access and sharing currently enjoyed by genome researchers via GenBank, or astronomers via the National Virtual Observatory, but for the whole of US science.
Scientists would then be able to access data from any federal agency and integrate it into their studies. For example, a researcher browsing an online journal article on the spread of a disease could not only pull up the underlying data, but mesh them with information from databases on agricultural land use, weather and genetic sequences.
Nature has learned that a draft strategic plan will be drawn up by next autumn by a new Interagency Working Group on Digital Data (IWGDD)."
Content for this entry quoted from Butler, D. 2007. Agencies join forces to share data. Nature (446): 354.