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Faculty Resource Guide

This libguide provides information on a wide range of issues of relevance to faculty including how to link to library resources, what you can and cannot put into Moodle, Open Content Sites, and Information about new Scholarly Communication Hubs.

What is Open Data?


Open Data is the idea that certain data and datasets should be made publicly available.  Some general information about it can be found at the Government of Canada Open Data 101 Site.  To date there have been a number of advances supporting Open Data including:

To learn more about Open Data consult Data Services at Brandon University. 
 
Tools that Aid in Locating and Sharing Open Data in Canada include: 
 
  • Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) allows you to (1) upload large data sets and (2) search for Canadian Research Data across repositories and (3) now includes Statistics Canada Open License Data as well as a growing number of City and University Open Data initiatives.  A great resource for Canadian Data.
     
  • Re3Data is a registry of research data repositories.  It lists data repositories by country, content type and subject.  Use it if you are trying determine where you can look for data or where to deposit data.
     
  • Canadian Government has launched the Open Government Portal with Access to Government of Canada Data.

Federal Support and Guidelines related to Open Data

Resources  that facilitate work with Open Data:

  • FAIR Principles provide guidelines to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets. The principles emphasise machine-actionability (i.e., the capacity of computational systems to find, access, interoperate, and reuse data with none or minimal human intervention) 
     
  • Advances in citing data.  Often citations are provided by repositories.  Other tools include guides to citing data such as Publishing and Citing Research Data.
     
  • DOIs for Research Data Sets.  Many of these are provided by Dataverse, Federated Research Data Repository  FRDR)  or DataCite.  

Tools that Aid in Locating and Sharing Open Data beyond Canada Canada

  • U.S. Government hosts data.gov for U.S. Government Data
     
  • Open Data In the U.K.  
     
  • Open Data in Australia 
     
  • Re3Data is a registry of research data repositories.  It lists data repositories by country, content type and subject.  Use it if you are trying determine where you can look for data or where to deposit data.

Open Data at BU
 

Researchers at Brandon University can make us of a number of services supportive of Open Data:

Brandon University’s instance of Dataverse is committed to hosting datasets produced by Brandon University researchers.  Researchers create accounts and upload data files.  This instance of Dataverse is part of Scholars Portal Dataverse.

For information on uploading content to Dataverse consult:

Available to Canadian Researchers and allows for the uploading of large data sets.

FRDR also allows you to search for Canadians Research Data across repositories and now includes Statistics Canada Open License Data  as well as a growing number of City and University Open Data initiatives.  A great resource for Canadian Data.

DMP Assistant is a bilingual tool for preparing data management plans (DMPs). The tool follows best practices in data stewardship and walks researchers step-by-step through key questions about data management.

NOTE: Portage is very excited to announce that the development and migration of DMP Assistant 2.0 is nearing its completion. As such, we would like to notify all users and administrators of the DMP Assistant that in preparation for the imminent launch of the DMP Assistant 2.0, the platform will be unavailable from Monday, February 22 to Monday, March 1, 2021 to allow for final migration of data. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

“Scholarly communication is the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created,   
evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use.”  ALA  

This library service area supports scholars with information pertaining to Research Services (including Data Management), Copyright, Open Access and Scholarly Impact Services.

Consult the Library’s Faculty Research Collection to learn about Data Management, Data Analysis, Research Ethics and Reproducible Research.

Open Data Leaders
 

Open Knowledge Foundation

Non-Profit Organization devoted to promoting Open Knowldge in all its forms.  The Foundation has several Working Groups, Projects, Local Chapters and Tools supportive of Open Knowledge.

Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR)

Canadian Association of Research Libraries together with Compute Canada have created the infrastructure for sharing research data in Canada via FRDR.  FRDR also allows you to search for Canadian Research Data across repositories and now includes Statistics Canada Open License Data.

Science Commons

Brought to us by Creative Commons, Science Commons advoates for liberation of data, datasets, and finding ways to ensure data can be integrated into databases without messy licensing issues getting in the way.

datalibre

datalibre.ca is a blog, inspired by civicaccess.ca, which believes all levels of Canadian governments should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens. Has a wealth of links.

Learn How to Contribute to Open Data


If you are interested in learning more about Open Data - consult the library’s Data Services Guide .

You can also consult the Open Data Handbook. This handbook introduces you to the legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It is created by the Open Knowledge Foundation Project.