From Google’s English: “The beta version of the oa.atlas shows strategies and services related to Open Access at German universities and research institutions….”
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Category Archives: oa.geo
Community survey – Diamond Open Access Journal in Geochemistry
“Community survey – Diamond Open Access Journal in Geochemistry
Personal information collected will only be used to help guide the formation the initial workgroup. It will then be deleted once the initial workgroup is formed. All other data will be anonymised and used to create the initial design of the journal. …”
Fifteen years of Open Data Allows Advancements in Landsat Use and Research | U.S. Geological Survey
“On this day in 2008, the USGS announced their plan to ‘open’ the USGS EROS Landsat archives, making all Landsat data available to download at no charge, to all users worldwide. Fifteen years later, in the “Year of Open Science”, Landsat continues to lead how Earth Observation data is utilized, and how Landsat data is used to support science and research efforts. …
The graph below displays number of Landsat-related citations (orange line) and the cost per scene (blue line) from 1970 to 2022. As expected, citations increased greatly after the data became freely available starting in December 2008….”
One more way AI can help us harness one of the most underutilized datasets in the world
“Satellite data may be one of the most underutilized datasets in the world.
At Planet alone, we have six years of documented history — which means we have over 2,000 images on average for every point on earth’s landmass. This dataset at high resolution never existed before Planet came along and created it.
What this dataset means is that you can see a lot of change…if you know where to look.
We’re pulling down 30TB of data daily (nearly 4 million images!) off of ~200 satellites, and it would be impossible for humans to look at, consume and derive insights from all of that manually. Some days, it can literally feel like the world’s largest hidden picture puzzle.
That’s why we crucially need artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to detect and inform us about what’s in this imagery. Given the size of our archive, it’s a veritable playground for Planeteers and our partners to train AI and ML models and to build algorithms that can extract objects and patterns – to find newly-built roads, identify collapsed or raised buildings, monitor change in forests throughout time, or track surveillance balloons over oceans – all possible today….”
UK Institutional Rights Retention Policies
“This page contains information about UK universities that have institutional rights retention policies. The raw data underlying these visualisations is available on github along with the code that generates this page….”
Postdoc in Data processing for open global environmental monitoring – WUR
“Are you a researcher skilled in software development and motivated in making Earth Observation data more accessible and impactful? Are you interested in working in a cutting-edge international consortium and research how different Earth Observation data clusters can interoperate? Then we are looking for you!
As a postdoctoral researcher, you will work on developing a backend for processing of global scale Earth Observation data within the novel Open Earth Monitor initiative. Your work is a key component for Open Earth Monitor to accelerate the uptake of environmental information to guide current and future users in research, decision making and citizens towards the most sustainable solutions.
Your task will be to make the Open Earth Monitor data processing backend interoperable with multiple satellite data and processing service providers, such as Sentinel Hub, EODC and VITO with the aim to improve the user accessibility. This work will be carried out in collaboration with multiple international scientific institutions and you will work closely together with the team of Prof. Edzer Pebesma from University of Münster (Institute for Geoinformatics), and researchers from EURAC Research, Sinergise, MultiOne, GILAB and OpenGeoHub. You will also have an opportunity to build upon the OpenEO API by helping extend the API with machine learning capabilities and handling of in-situ data….”
Land Ownership and the State of Open Data
“Key Points
The links between the open data and land communities have matured over the last four years alongside a recognition of the centrality of land governance for sustainable development.
Benchmarking and measuring open land data is a key area of progress since 2018, but more needs to be done to refine the global benchmarks such as the Global Data Barometer.
Open data initiatives need to carefully consider their social, political, and economic objectives due to the different needs and interests of land data producers and users….
The perspective of land data is changing from being primarily about the cadastre17,18 (the official register showing details of ownership, boundaries, and value of property) to increasingly being rooted in land management functions19 and services within the context of sustainable development. This approach, in which open data is not the goal but rather a service-enabling tool,20 is also reflected in the research on Open Data Products (ODPs).21 Since 2018, the Open Data Charter has moved its strategic focus from an “Open by Default” to a “Publishing with a Purpose”22 paradigm. The paradigm shift was also reflected in the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly high-level event on “Data With a Purpose”23held on 22 September 2022. This is a much-needed approach as research suggests that open geospatial data portals are significantly underutilised globally24 and that public and private organisations that invest in open data do so in order to seem transparent, rather than to create or add value to it.25 Adding value to open data and focussing on data services is a means to spur innovation and increase the uptake of data, while lowering barriers for a wider audience to access and benefit from the data revolution….”
Are papers published in predatory journals worthless? A geopolitical dimension revealed by content-based analysis of citations | Quantitative Science Studies | MIT Press
This study uses content-based citation analysis to move beyond the simplified classification of predatory journals. We present that, when we analyze papers not only in terms of the quantity of their citations but also the content of these citations, we are able to show the various roles played by papers published in journals accused of being predatory. To accomplish this, we analyzed the content of 9,995 citances (i.e., citation sentences) from 6,706 papers indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection, which cites papers published in so-called “predatory” (or questionable) journals. The analysis revealed that the vast majority of such citances are neutral (97.3%), and negative citations of articles published in the analyzed journals are almost completely nonexistent (0.8%). Moreover, the analysis revealed that the most frequently mentioned countries in the citances are India, Pakistan, and Iran, with mentions of Western countries being rare. This highlights a geopolitical bias and shows the usefulness of looking at such journals as mislocated centers of scholarly communication. The analyzed journals provide regional data prevalent for mainstream scholarly discussions, and the idea of predatory publishing hides geopolitical inequalities in global scholarly publishing. Our findings also contribute to the further development of content-based citation analysis.
Pieter Vander Vennet’s Diary | OpenStreetMap is in trouble | OpenStreetMap
“It is a long-standing tradition that every now and then, a member of the OpenStreetMap-community posts that OSM is in trouble. Often times, these essays complain about some trivial things which are, in the end, not that important. For example, they complain that we didn’t implement Bézier curves yet (we don’t need them), or that the data model is stale (it isn’t, new tagging appears every day), that the main OSM.org website doesn’t have some feature and isn’t on par with Google Maps (that’s by intent) or that AI will make the entire manual mapping space obsolete, in “just another ten years time”.
However, most of these things miss the crucial point of what OSM is: a community; a group of people that are working together on mapping the world in an Open Data way and building related tools with Open Source. Our strength is the unison in this goal, even though everyone pursues this differently, through different technological means and for different motivations. Motivations range from the most mundane reasons up till political activism. And that’s fine. All this activity and diversity strengthens us as a global community.
However, recently, a new participant has entered the ecosystem with parasitic intents. It tries to capture away precisely what makes OSM strong: the contributors.
The means to this end is called ‘Bing Map Builder’….”
An open database on global coal and metal mine production | Scientific Data
Abstract: While the extraction of natural resources has been well documented and analysed at the national level, production trends at the level of individual mines are more difficult to uncover, mainly due to poor availability of mining data with sub-national detail. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by presenting an open database on global coal and metal mine production on the level of individual mines. It is based on manually gathered information from more than 1900 freely available reports of mining companies, where every data point is linked to its source document, ensuring full transparency. The database covers 1171 individual mines and reports mine-level production for 80 different materials in the period 2000–2021. Furthermore, also data on mining coordinates, ownership, mineral reserves, mining waste, transportation of mining products, as well as mineral processing capacities (smelters and mineral refineries) and production is included.
Let peer review be transparent | Communications Earth & Environment
“For all peer reviewed articles submitted from 23rd January 2023, we will publish the editor decision letters, reviewer reports and author responses, together with the published paper. Reviewers can choose to remain anonymous or reveal their identity….
At Communications Earth & Environment, we are convinced that opening up the scholarly discussions that precede publication of our articles will deepen understanding of the scientific process and help spark trust in science. We are enormously grateful for the time and effort our reviewers put into elaborating on the merits and shortcomings of papers with the aim to improve them. We are impressed by the detailed and positive letters our authors send back along with their revisions in response to the points raised by the reviewers. And we are proud to put care and thought into our editorial decisions and give constructive guidance to our authors by explaining our take on the reviewer comments….”
RePP Africa – a georeferenced and curated database on existing and proposed wind, solar, and hydropower plants | Scientific Data
Abstract: Promoting a transition to low-carbon energy systems to mitigate climate change requires an optimization of renewable energy (RE) planning. However, curated data for the most promising RE technologies, hydro-, wind and solar power, are missing, which limits data-based decision-making support. Here, a spatially explicit database for existing and proposed renewable power plants is provided: The Renewable Power Plant database for Africa (RePP Africa) encompasses 1074 hydro-, 1128 solar, and 276 wind power plant records. For each power plant, geographic coordinates, country, construction status, and capacity (in megawatt) are reported. The number of RePP Africa records exceeds the respective values in other existing open-access databases and matches available cumulative capacity data reported by international energy organizations best with deviations <13% for hydro-, <23% for wind, and <32% for solar power plants. This contemporary database is the most harmonized open-accessible reference source on RE power plants across Africa for stakeholders from science, (non-)governmental organizations, consulting, and industry; providing a fundamental data basis for the development of an integrated sustainable RE mix.
Kenyon | The Journal Article as a Means to Share Data: a Content Analysis of Supplementary Materials from Two Disciplines | Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication
Abstract: INTRODUCTION The practice of publishing supplementary materials with journal articles is becoming increasingly prevalent across the sciences. We sought to understand better the content of these materials by investigating the differences between the supplementary materials published by authors in the geosciences and plant sciences. METHODS We conducted a random stratified sampling of four articles from each of 30 journals published in 2013. In total, we examined 297 supplementary data files for a range of different factors. RESULTS We identified many similarities between the practices of authors in the two fields, including the formats used (Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs) and the small size of the files. There were differences identified in the content of the supplementary materials: the geology materials contained more maps and machine-readable data; the plant science materials included much more tabular data and multimedia content. DISCUSSION Our results suggest that the data shared through supplementary files in these fields may not lend itself to reuse. Code and related scripts are not often shared, nor is much ‘raw’ data. Instead, the files often contain summary data, modified for human reading and use. CONCLUSION Given these and other differences, our results suggest implications for publishers, librarians, and authors, and may require shifts in behavior if effective data sharing is to be realized.
Mayernik | The Role of Metadata and Vocabulary Standards in Enabling Scientific Data Interoperability: A Study of Earth System Science Data Facilities | Journal of eScience Librarianship
Abstract: Objective: Journal publishers within many sciences are increasingly expecting data to be deposited into repositories that support the FAIR principles. Data repositories are thus needing to determine what implications the FAIR principles have on their existing services and systems. Metadata standards and controlled vocabularies are specifically called out as core components of the FAIR principles related to interoperability.
Methods: This paper looks specifically at the ways that metadata standards and controlled vocabularies are used by Earth system science data repositories. Data sets from 55 data facilities were examined to determine which metadata standards and controlled subject / keyword vocabularies were used.
Results: The findings indicate that only the ISO 19115:2003 and DataCite metadata standards are used by more than 40% of the data facilities, and the NASA Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) keywords are the only keyword vocabulary of broad use within this community.
Conclusions: These findings raise questions about the extent to which metadata standards and keyword vocabularies can facilitate interoperability beyond narrow sub-sections of the data facility communities. This study also points to systematic challenges related to migration to new standards.
PLOS partners with EarthArXiv for 2023 – Latitude
“We are pleased to announce that PLOS has entered into a partnership with EarthArXiv—a preprint server focused on earth and planetary science, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary research. EarthArXiv is a community-based server, governed by a diverse advisory council with representatives from many regions and institutions, and hosted by the California Digital Library (CDL), an organization committed to open scholarship.
This relationship will open new opportunities for authors submitting to PLOS Climate, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, and PLOS Water to post preprints with ease. Beginning early in 2023, submitting authors will have the option to automatically forward their manuscript to the EarthArXiv preprint server, directly from our submission system….”