Why the Current Insistence on Open Access to Scientific Data? Big Data, Knowledge Production and the Political Economy of Contemporary Biology
Leonelli, Sabina
Date: 2013
Publisher
Sage
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Abstract
The collection and dissemination of data on human and non-human organisms has
become a central feature of 21st century biology and has been endorsed by funding agencies
in the United States and Europe as crucial to translating biological research into therapeutic
and agricultural innovation. Large molecular datasets, often referred ...
The collection and dissemination of data on human and non-human organisms has
become a central feature of 21st century biology and has been endorsed by funding agencies
in the United States and Europe as crucial to translating biological research into therapeutic
and agricultural innovation. Large molecular datasets, often referred to as ‘big data’, are
increasingly incorporated into digital databases, many of which are freely accessible online.
These data have come to be seen as resources that play a key role in mediating global market
exchange, thus achieving a prominent social and economic status well beyond science itself.
At the same time, calls to make all such data publicly and freely available have garnered
strength and visibility, most prominently in the form of the Open Data movement. I discuss
these developments by considering the conditions under which data journey across the
communities and institutions implicated in globalized biology and biomedicine; and what this
indicates about how internet-based communication and the use of online databases impact
scientific research and its role within contemporary society.
Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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