ConnectEDU, a college and career planning site that collected student data, has proposed selling information as part of bankruptcy proceedings.

Technological progress should bring greater safety, economic opportunity, and convenience to everyone. And the collection of new types of data is essential for documenting persistent inequality and discrimination. At the same time, as new technologies allow companies and government to gain greater insight into our lives, it is vitally important that these technologies be designed […]

The scholarly communication landscape is rapidly changing and nowhere is this more evident than in the field of data management. Mandates by major funding agencies, further expanded by executive order and pending legislation in 2013, require many research grant applicants to provide data management plans for preserving and making their research data openly available. However, do faculty researchers have the requisite skill sets and are their institutions providing the necessary infrastructure to comply with these mandates? To answer these questions, three groups were surveyed in 2012: research and teaching faculty, sponsored programs office staff, and institutional repository librarians. Survey results indicate that while faculty desire to share their data, they often lack the skills to do this effectively. Similarly, while repository managers and sponsored programs offices often provide the necessary infrastructure and knowledge, these resources are not being promoted effectively to faculty. The study offers important insights about services academic libraries can provide to support faculty in their data management efforts: providing tools for sharing research data; assisting with describing, finding, or accessing research data; providing information on copyright and ownership issues associated with data sets; and assisting with writing data management plans.

Most data-driven "civic apps" report problems. What if they facilitated civic engagement instead?

I get asked pretty often whether I “believe” in open data. I tend to murmur a response along the lines of “it depends,” which doesn’t seem too satisfying to me or to t…

Nice discussion of who gets credit for what.

Nice brief overview of several data-ethics issues.

Scientists can be reluctant to share data because of the need to publish journal articles and receive recognition. But what if the data sets were actually a better way of getting credit for your wo…

Proposed class-action suit says Family Tree violated Alaska Genetic Privacy Act.

I gave a talk at Seagate entitled:   Storage Will Be  Much Less Free  Than It Used To Be  Below the fold is an edited text with links to the...

AbstractPeer review holds a central place within the scientific communication system. Traditionally, research quality has been assessed by peer review of journal articles, conference proceedings, and books. There is strong support for the peer review process within the academic community, with scholars contributing peer reviews with little formal reward. Reviewing is seen as a contribution to the community as well as an opportunity to polish and refine understanding of the cutting edge of research. This paper discusses the applicability of the peer review process for assessing and ensuring the quality of datasets. Establishing the quality of datasets is a multifaceted task that encompasses many automated and manual processes. Adding research data into the publication and peer review queues will increase the stress on the scientific publishing system, but if done with forethought will also increase the trustworthiness and value of individual datasets, strengthen the findings based on cited datasets, and increase the transparency and traceability of data and publications.This paper discusses issues related to data peer review—in particular, the peer review processes, needs, and challenges related to the following scenarios: 1) data analyzed in traditional scientific articles, 2) data articles published in traditional scientific journals, 3) data submitted to open access data repositories, and 4) datasets published via articles in data journals.

What makes the new, data-heavy advertising so cunning is that it creates the illusion that we're still making autonomous choices

Social scientists around the world received a jolt in recent days when they were informed that one of the most popular cloud collaboration services not only crashed, but also may not be able to restore data added over the last three weeks.

The cloud's gonna fix everything. Yep.