This week featured continued activity at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases.

WELCOME PAM!

Pam Crawford officially adopted the Kansas page this week and immediately got to work on a number of updates.

ORPHANS - THEN THERE WERE THREE

The adoption of Kansas leaves us with just three states waiting for volunteer government information specialists/enthusiasts to adopt them:

• Hawaii
• Minnesota
• Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting.

DATABASE ACTIVITY

For a complete picture of activity on our project this week, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are some highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

FLORIDA (Wilhelmina Randtke)

CHARTS Community Health Assessment Resource Tool Set - Includes such health statistics as births, deaths, disease morbidity, behavioral risk factors, communicable diseases, chronic diseases, maternal & child health, environmental health, injury & violence, social & mental health, and population characteristics.

KANSAS (Pam Crawford)

Addiction Treatment Centers - Searchable by zip code, county, or city.

MARYLAND (Siu Min Yu)

Maryland Funding Accountability & Transparency - Search by agency making a payment, by vendor receiving a payment or by zip code of a vendor receiving payment. From the website, "This is a public web site which allows citizens of Maryland and visitors to search and view summary information on payments made to vendors that received $25,000 or more for the respective fiscal year. Information is currently available beginning Fiscal Year 2008."

If you're an aspiring (or accidental) data librarian, or just want to know more about Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), then here's a webinar for you!

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/343617266

This session will cover effective search strategies, ICPSR’s bibliography of data-related literature, our growing tools associated with the social science variables database, and more!

This session is for those who are searching for research data or teaching tools and those who are helping others to find data or teaching tools.
Title: Hands-Ons with ICPSR - Discovering ICPSR Data
Date: Monday, February 25, 2013
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST
After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation has a must-read post about the Government Printing Office, the Joint Committee on Printing, and The Statutes at Large:

• 
  GPO is Closing Gap on Public Access to Law at JCP's Direction, But Much Work Remains, by Daniel Schuman, The Sunlight Foundation (Feb. 19, 2013).

  The GPO's recent electronic publication of all legislation enacted by Congress from 1951-2009 is noteworthy for several reasons. It makes available nearly 40 years of lawmaking that wasn't previously available online from any official source, narrowing part of a much larger information gap. It meets one of three long-standing directives from Congress's Joint Committee on Printing regarding public access to important legislative information. And it has published the information in a way that provides a platform for third-party providers to cleverly make use of the information. While more work is still needed to make important legislative information available to the public, this online release is a useful step in the right direction.

This week featured a burst of activity at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. We saw many, many link fixes in addition to the new databases featured below.

WELCOME WILHELMINA!

Wilhelmina Randtke officially adopted the Florida page this week and immediately got to work on a number of updates.

ORPHANS - THE FINAL FOUR

The adoption of Florida leaves us with just four states waiting for volunteer government information specialists/enthusiasts to adopt them:

• Hawaii
• Kansas
• Minnesota
• Oklahoma

If you are interested in adopting one of these pages, please read our volunteer guide and make sure you can accept the responsibilities of a project volunteer. Then contact project coordinator Daniel Cornwall at danielcornwall@gmail.com with a statement of interest and your favorite database from the page you are adopting.

DATABASE ACTIVITY

For a complete picture of activity on our project, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs. Here are some highlights:

DATABASES ADDED

FLORIDA (Wilhelmina Randtke)

Accommodations Finder - makes planning your trip to Florida easy by searching accommodations and activities by category: attractions, birding, boating, campgrounds, cycling, dining, diving & snorkeling, fishing, golf, hiking, historic attractions, historical lodging, museums, natural history, parks, performing arts, romance, shopping, spas, and visitor services.

MONTANA (Susanne Caro)

Montana Place Names - This traveler’s guide, based on the places found on the 2003 Montana highway map, explores the origins of more than 1100 Montana place names, hundreds of geographic features and historical locations.

INDIANA (Stephanie Martin)

Business Entity Name Search - From website, search database to "Get information on Indiana companies, download official Certificates, order Business Entity Documents, and locate Control number."

DATABASES REMOVED

FLORIDA

Institution Search & Profiles (formally at http://www.facts.org/) - provides details on a particular postsecondary school in Florida such as admissions information, cost, degrees offered, total enrollment, or activities and sports available.

The Sunlight Foundation has just released Open States for all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The site helps the public find their state legislators, review their votes, search upcoming legislation, and track bill progress. Open States gets their Bill, legislator, committee and event data from official sources, linked at the bottom of each legislator, bill, vote, committee or event page. Check out their methodology for more. They rely primarily on scraping data from sites. Wouldn't it be awesome of all state legislatures had bulk data feeds so that 1000 sites like Open States could bloom? Join the Webinar on February 22nd to learn more about Open States.

After more than four years of work from volunteers and a full-time team here at Sunlight we're immensely proud to launch the full Open States site with searchable legislative data for all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Open States is the only comprehensive database of activities from all state capitols that makes it easy to find your state lawmaker, review their votes, search for legislation, track bills and much more.

If you're interested in your state lawmaker, you'll be able to get notifications for their actions, a map of their district, voting records, committee assignments, campaign finance records from Influence Explorer, local news articles and contact information. If you're curious about a particular piece of legislation, Open States allows you to check on its status, find the sponsors, break down votes, view bill text and all supporting documents. Our powerful search capabilities allow you to find similar topics across states and view overview pages for each state, chamber and committee.

We all know about the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, but did you know there were Code Talkers in World War I? Or that the very first US military code talkers were Choctaw and Comanche?

Suzanne Marshall, an MLIS student at Florida State University and reference librarian at West Florida Public Library serves up these facts and more in an article titled "A hidden story: American Indian Code Talkers" in the Winter 2012 Student Papers Issue of Dttp: Documents to the People.

The story of the Indian Code Talkers and belated efforts to honor their work is a story interesting in and of itself. But Suzanne uses this story and some unanswered questions as a springboard to explain the current state of affairs in government archival material and to argue for facilitated access to such material.

She concludes with:

Citizens rightfully own government documents and must be granted not only access but facilitated access to those documents. Important facts are, by default, invisible and virtually inaccessible without facilitated access. As this case of the American Indian code talkers highlights, we must strive to reveal the rich heritage we share in our co-owned government documents.

We agree.

Reference:

Marshall, Suzanne. A hidden story: American Indian Code Talkers. Dttp: Documents to the People, v. 40, no. 4, Winter 2012, p. 27

This announcement was just posted to the Global Open Access List (GOAL). We think it's a great move forward in offering free access to federally funded research. Infodocket has several other links of interest, including analysis by Peter Suber. If you support FASTR, please tell Congress.

U.S. Representatives Introduce Bill Expanding Access to Federally Funded Research

Washington, DC, February 14, 2013

U.S. Representatives Mike Doyle (D-PA), Kevin Yoder (R-KS), and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) today introduced legislation to increase the openness, transparency, and accessibility of publicly funded research results.

The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) would require federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

"This bill will give the American people greater access to the important scientific research results they've paid for," Congressman Doyle said today. Supporting greater collaboration among researchers in the sciences will accelerate scientific innovation and discovery, while giving the public a greater return on their scientific investment.

"The scientific research community benefits when they are able to share important research and cooperate across scientific fields. Likewise, taxpayers should not be required to pay twice for federally-funded research," said Congressman Yoder. "This legislation is common sense,
and promotes more transparency, accountability, and cooperation within the scientific research community."

"Everyday American taxpayer dollars are supporting researchers and scientists hard at work, when this information is shared, it can be used as a building block for future discoveries," said Representative Lofgren. "Greater public access can accelerate breakthroughs, where robust collaborative research can lead to faster commercialization and immense benefits for the public and our economy."

Specifically, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act would:

• Require federal departments and agencies with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more, whether funded totally or partially by a government department or agency, to submit an electronic copy of the final manuscript that has been accepted for publication in a
  peer-reviewed journal.
• Ensure that the manuscript is preserved in a stable digital repository maintained by that agency or in another suitable repository that permits free public access, interoperability, and long-term preservation.
• Require that each taxpayer-funded manuscript be made available to the public online and without cost, no later than six months after the article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
• Require agencies to examine whether introducing open licensing options for research papers they make publicly available as a result of the public access policy would promote productive reuse and computational analysis of those research papers.

An identical Senate counterpart of this legislation is also being introduced today by Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Ron Wyden (D-OR).

"FASTR represents a giant step forward in making sure that the crucial information contained in these articles can be freely accessed and fully
used by all members of the public," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing Academic Research Coalition (SPARC). "It has the potential to truly revolutionize the scientific research process."

This legislation would unlock unclassified research funded by agencies like the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation.

The bill builds on the success of the first U.S. mandate for public access to the published results of publicly funded research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) implemented their public access policy. It is estimated that approximately 80,000 papers are published each year from NIH funds.

The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act echoes the interest in public access policies expressed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which has examined the mechanisms that would leverage federal investments in scientific research and increase access to information that promises to stimulate scientific and technological innovation and competitiveness.

Click here to read the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act.

From a press release from GPO:

President Obama’s State Of The Union Address Available On Gpo’s Federal Digital System

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) makes President Barack Obama's State of the Union address available on GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys). The public can access the President’s address in the Congressional Record, which is the official publication of the U.S. Congress.

Direct link to address: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-2013-02-12/html/CREC-2013-02-12-pt1-Pg...

Carl Malamud posted the following to BoingBoing today:

Assemblyman Brian Nestande of California has introduced Assembly Bill 292, which would open source the California Code of Regulations (including the Building Codes!!). The summary reads:

"This bill would provide that the full text of the California Code of Regulations shall bear an open access creative commons attribution license, allowing any individual, at no cost, to use, distribute, and create derivative works based on the material for either commercial or noncommercial purposes."

Public.Resource.Org has bulk data for the CCR and the public safety codes (known as Title 24) online, but this would all be way easier if we didn't have to double-key the building codes every 3 years and jump on the West CD-ROM every 2 months to extract the data. This move would lead to tremendous innovation, just like we've seen when the Federal Register went open source in bulk.

The bill sponsor, Assemblyman Nestande, has a long background in public policy and IP. He was campaign manager for Sonny Bono's successful 1994 congressional campaign.

[HT BoingBoing!]

The Obama Administration has launched the Smart Disclosure Data Community at Consumer.Data.gov.

• Consumer.Data.gov.

  This site is a centralized federal resource for Smart Disclosure. Here you will find hundreds of government datasets that can help enable consumer choice; apps that demonstrate the power of Smart Disclosure; challenges for app developers; and resources to learn more about Smart Disclosure.

• Consumer.Data.Gov is Live!, by Sophie Raseman and Nick Sinai, whitehouse.gov (February 11, 2013).

  The Community announced today is a first-of-its-kind centralized platform containing over 400 smart disclosure data sets and resources from dozens of agencies across government. Using the Community, entrepreneurs and innovators can access free Federal data to create the consumer applications, products, and services of the future -- all in one convenient location.