Is It Open Data?^Beta

Dr Christoph Steinbeck (Eur. Bioinf, Inst.) Dr David Wild (Indiana Univ.)

Dear David and Christoph

I am writing ask you (as editors) about the Openness of data published in J. Cheminformatics. Open data is now essential for information-driven science and one of the important goals is to make it clear to humans and machines which data are fully Open. The Open Knowledge Foundation has produced a definition of Open Knowledge [1] which in simple terms allows anyone to download, and re-use the data for any legitimate purpose. The CC-BY license, which you use, is automatically compatible with the Open definition but it would be extremely helpful to have confirmation of that.

Assuming you agree, as a further and culture-changing step we would ask you to add "Open Data" buttons to the material you publish. These would function technically in the same way as Open Access buttons (which you already use) and link through to the OKF's Open Definition [1]. This promotes the idea of Open Data and will allow machines as well as humans to extract and index your data in the confident knowledge that they have the authors' and journal's blessing.

Best

Peter Murray-Rust

[1] http://www.opendefinition.org/1.0/
[2] http://www.opendefinition.org/licenses/

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