Home » Posts tagged 'open access'
Tag Archives: open access
Cool new dataset on American local government elections
Thanks very much to my friend and former Stanford colleague Kris Kasianovitz (as well as the awesome librarians at UC Berkeley!) for pointing to this Nature article “American local government elections database” (and it’s Open Access to boot!!). Kudos to de Benedictis-Kessner, Lee, Velez, et al for the yeoman’s work of collecting this massive amount of data AND for making it freely available to others! This is an excellent example of what researchers should do when they collect data for their research — publish their article AND make their dataset publicly available in an open data repository like Open Science Framework (OSF) or ICPSR (the grandpappy of all social science data repositories!). And it’s also a critical dataset for researchers in an area of government data (state and local) that is frequently difficult to find and even less frequently collated across multiple states and municipalities. One of my most frequent data requests is for elections but most researchers want to do comparisons across jurisdictions, states, years etc and there just is no “one dataset to rule them all.”
As KrisK notes in her post to the GOVDOC-L Listserv, PLEASE encourage faculty, students, researchers, journalists etc who put in the time and energy to collect local level data to make their datasets available through institutional or other data repositories (e.g. OpenICPSR, OSF, etc.). Collecting important data, especially at the multi-state and multi-municipality level, is a Many-hands-make-light-work kind of activity and is so impactful for other researchers, students, journalists, and the public who are exploring and trying to understand their worlds.
“One of the most persistent challenges in the study of urban and local politics in the United States is the lack of information about local elections, candidates, and elected officials. As a result, studies on local elections tend to focus on a single time period, geographic unit, or office, rather than holistically examining variation across time, geography, and offices.
In this paper, we describe a new database of election returns from about 78,000 unique candidates in about 57,000 contests in 1,747 cities, counties, and school districts from 1989–2021. Our database is the most comprehensive publicly-available source of information on local elections across the entire country. It includes information about elections for mayors, city councils, county executives, county legislatures, sheriffs, prosecutors, and school boards. It also includes a host of supplemental data, including estimates of candidate partisanship, gender, race/ethnicity, and incumbency status. For many elections, it also includes information on the political characteristics of constituencies, such as their ideology and presidential voting patterns.
This new database will enable scholars to study a wide variety of research questions. It enables examination of whether politicians represent the demographic, partisan, and ideological characteristics of their constituents. It also enables expanded work on the factors that affect local elections. Moreover, it facilitates study of the incumbency advantage across election types, institutional contexts, and candidate
characteristics. Finally, this database enables scholars to expand the study of how elections shape a host of political outcomes such as policy, political communication, interest group activity and intergovernmental lobbying.”
Citations:
- de Benedictis-Kessner, J., Lee, D.D.I., Velez, Y.R. et al. American local government elections database. Sci Data 10, 912 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02792-x
- American Local Government Elections Database
Contributors: Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, Diana Da In Lee, Yamil Velez, Christopher Warshaw
Date created: 2023-04-11 02:17 PM
Identifier: DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/MV5E6
US government to make all federally funded research open access on publication
This is certainly good news! The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) yesterday released guidance for federal agencies to “ensure free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research.” This builds on the 2013 Obama administration’s Memorandum on Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research which directed all federal departments and agencies with more than $100 million in annual research and development expenditures to develop a plan to support increased public access to the results of federally funded research, with specific focus on access to scholarly publications and digital data resulting from such research. This new policy directs agencies to “update their public access policies as soon as possible, and no later than December 31, 2025.”
Of course, from FGI’s perspective, a key piece of making federally funded research open access is the curation, preservation and ongoing access to those publications. We wonder how this will impact the Government Publishing Office (GPO) in its quest to build the “National Collection of U.S. Government Public Information.”
Today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) updated U.S. policy guidance to make the results of taxpayer-supported research immediately available to the American public at no cost. In a memorandum to federal departments and agencies, Dr. Alondra Nelson, the head of OSTP, delivered guidance for agencies to update their public access policies as soon as possible to make publications and research funded by taxpayers publicly accessible, without an embargo or cost. All agencies will fully implement updated policies, including ending the optional 12-month embargo, no later than December 31, 2025.
This policy will likely yield significant benefits on a number of key priorities for the American people, from environmental justice to cancer breakthroughs, and from game-changing clean energy technologies to protecting civil liberties in an automated world.
NASA rolls out PubSpace, public portal for NASA-funded research
The 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum, “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research,” is really starting to bare fruit. NASA just announced the creation of PubSpace — which will go hand in hand with the NASA Data Portal — to provide a public access portal to NASA-funded research AND the underlying data.
There are 2 things to note: 1) NASA is using PubMedCentral (PMC) as its repository, along with other federal agencies like National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institute of Standards and technology (NIST), and the Veterans Administration (VA); and 2) as the NASA press release notes, there will be a deficit embargo period placed on NASA funded publications as researchers will have 1 year to deposit articles and data into PubSpace.
This is a very good step in the right Open Access direction for free access to federally funded research and data!
Public access to NASA-funded research data now is just a click away, with the launch of a new agency public access portal. The creation of the NASA-Funded Research Results portal on NASA.gov reflects the agency’s ongoing commitment to providing broad public access to science data.
“At NASA, we are celebrating this opportunity to extend access to our extensive portfolio of scientific and technical publications,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman. “Through open access and innovation we invite the global community to join us in exploring Earth, air and space.”
NASA now requires articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers in juried conference proceedings be publicly accessible via the agency’s PubSpace.
PubSpace is an archive of original science journal articles produced by NASA-funded research and available online without a fee. The data will be available for download, reading and analysis within one year of publication.
via NASA Unveils New Public Web Portal for Research Results | NASA.
Open CRS Bill Introduced In House and Senate
This is YUGE! The “Equal Access to Congressional Research Service Reports Act of 2016” was introduced in both the House and the Senate, cosponsored by Senators McCain and Leahy and Representatives Lance and Quigley. 40 organizations — including FGI and Stanford University libraries (where I work)! — signed a letter in support of the legislation, nicknamed the OpenCRS Act. Read Senator Leahy’s press release.
Today Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Representatives Leonard Lance (R-NJ) and Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced in the House and Senate legislation directing the online publication of Congressional Research Service reports that are available for general congressional access. A coalition of 40 civil society and grassroots organizations, libraries, trade associations, think tanks, and businesses from across the political spectrum released this statement in support of the legislation:
We, the undersigned organizations, endorse the Equal Access to Congressional Research Service Reports Act of 2016. The legislation provides the public timely, comprehensive, free access to Congressional Research Service reports.
We commend Sens. John McCain and Patrick Leahy and Reps. Leonard Lance and Mike Quigley for their tireless efforts to ensure equitable access for all Americans to these documents, which provide insight into the important issues before Congress and are paid for by taxpayers.
We urge the Senate’s Committee on Rules and Administration and the House of Representative’s Committee on House Administration to speedily approve the legislation.
via Open CRS Bill Introduced In House and Senate — Demand Progress — Medium.
Hot off the presses: “Public Knowledge: Access and Benefits”
Government information specialists know the value of the information that government agencies gather, create, assemble, and distribute, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a book that documents that value and provides examples of how that information is used? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a book that doesn’t just list useful databases, but describes the missions and histories of the agencies that produce the information?
Back in 2013, Dr. Miriam Drake, longtime director and dean of libraries at Georgia Institute of Technology, wanted to create such a book: A book about the value of public information and how the communities that libraries serve actually use that information. The result is this new book that we think deserves the attention of practicing government information professionals and teachers:
-
Public Knowledge: Access and Benefits, Edited by Miriam A. Drake and Donald T. Hawkins, Foreword by Judith Coffey Russell. Medford NJ: Information Today, Inc. (2016).
Government documents librarians know and use FDsys (and now govinfo), and USA.gov, and the Catalog of Government Publications and specialty web sites like the Census Bureau’s American Factfinder and the Bureau of Economic Analysis and The National Archives and Congress, and GPO’s federated search engine metalib, and probably at least a few more. But after the basics, it is hard to keep track of the wealth of information available and how to find it. You might know, for example, that there are 123 U.S. federal government agencies that collect and distribute important statistical data, but how do you find it and which agency is best for which statistic? Have you ever used the Library of Congress’s Performing Arts Encyclopedia, or think about the non-government, public knowledge in the LoC, such as historic newspapers online? How many of the Databases, Resources & APIs at the National Library of Medicine have you explored? You’ve used USA.gov, but have you tried Science.gov or WorldWideScience.org? Are you helping your community find datasets, but you haven’t used OSTI data explorer?
And, if you have used some of those, but haven’t had time to understand the subtle differences between databases or agencies (e.g., do you know when to use NASA Technical Reports Server and when to use The National Technical Information Service?), you will find this book useful. This book will be useful for those who answer reference questions and work with communities who need information in almost any discipline. It gives the historical context of the development of the vast government information infrastructure and describes how agencies are changing rapidly and planning for the future. If you are a new or “accidental” government information librarian, or if you teach government documents, this book is for you.
And, yes, we wrote a chapter of this book, but we’d be praising its utility even if we were not part of it. The publisher has kindly allowed us to offer you a PDF copy of the chapter we wrote for this book.
- Beyond LMGTFY*: Access to Government Information in a Networked World. by James A. Jacobs and James R. Jacobs. (*LMGTFY = “Let me google that for you”)
Every chapter is different and every chapter is worthwhile. Here is a complete list of the chapters and authors.
Table of Contents
- The Relationship Between Citizen Information Literacy and Public Information Use. Forest “Woody” Horton Jr.
- Beyond LMGTFY: Access to Government Information in a Networked World. James A. Jacobs, University of California-San Diego Library, and James R. Jacobs, Stanford University Libraries.
- Government Resources in the Classroom. Susanne Caro, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, University of Montana.
- The U.S. Government Publishing Office. Miriam A. Drake and Donald T. Hawkins.
- The Library of Congress. Miriam A. Drake.
- The National Library of Medicine. Katherine B. Majewski, MEDLARS Management Section, and Wanda Whitney, Reference and Web Services Section, National Library of Medicine.
- The Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information, Part 1: Extending the Reach and Impact of DOE Research Results. Brian A. Hitson and Peter M. Lincoln, Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
- The Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information, Part 2: Bringing the World’s Research to DOE. Brian A. Hitson and Peter M. Lincoln, Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
- NASA’s Scientific and Technical Information for a Changing World. Lynn Heimerl, NASA STI Program.
- The National Technical Information Service: Public Access as a Driver of Change. Gail Hodge, Ha (Information International Associates).
- Federal Statistics Past and Present. Mark Anderson, Michener Library, University of Northern Colorado.
- Agricultural Information and the National Agricultural Library. Marianne Stowell Bracke, Purdue University Libraries.
- Hidden Government Information. Miriam A. Drake.
- The Future Is Open. Barbie E. Keiser, Barbie E. Keiser, Inc.
James A. Jacobs
James R. Jacobs
Latest Comments