This blog post is part of an assignment for the Open Science course offered by the P2P University. In this week assignment, we were asked to assess the openess of the following 3 repositories:
- Conservation Biology Institute's (CBI) Data Basin;
- Cambridge Structural Database; and
- NASA's Life Science Data Repositories.
The Data Basin repository provides environmental information, such as physical locations, qualitative and quantitative measurements. Although the website allows non-registered users to search and visualize datasets, it requires an account to contribute to any datasets. The default license for any datasets is the Creative Commons attribution license (i.e. CC BY), but any user is able to enforce a less open license. Out of the three investigated datasets, this is the one that meets most of the open data paradigms.
The Cambridge Structural Database contains data about small-molecule organic and metal-organic crystal structures. The data in the database is copyrighted by the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre. The use of the data is restricted to research and academic and cannot be re-published or used for commercial purpose. The license agreement even stipulates that the data needs to be deleted within 14 days of downloading the data. In other words, the access to data is not very open.
The Life Science Data Repositories provides information about spatial missions and the experiments that took place there. Although the website provides a search tool to see the description of the datasets, the actual data is protected via the Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. §552a). However, users can request access to the data via the Freedom of Information act (5 U.S.C. §552).
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