As preparations were underway in Northern Ireland for the 39th G8 summit, science ministers from G8 nations met with their national science academies to discuss the most pressing issues in research facing scientists worldwide. Their recommendations will be put to the G8 leaders during talks being held June 17-18. Among them are decisive actions required to make scientific research more open and more accessible.

In a statement released on June 13, the group noted that open enquiry is at the heart of scientific endeavour, and rapid technological change has profound implications for the way that science is both conducted and its results communicated. Further they announced their support for a clear set of principles for more open data, including that publicly funded research data should be made open, and that open data by definition should be easily discoverable, accessible and assessable.

Crucially, this set of principles acknowledges the need for open data to be written into government policy to ensure universal adoption, and for that policy to take into account the need for rewards and recognition for researchers opening up their data, and a digital infrastructure to support this data sharing. International collaboration will be essential to make this a global reality.

The G8 science ministers also made clear the importance of access to scientific research. This comes in the wake of steps taken in UK government policy (Universities Minister David Willets has mandated that all publicly funded research be published in gold or green open access venues) and wider lobbying from key figures in the research community. In the statement for G8 leaders, science ministers have outlined their main goals in relation to accessible research, highlighting the importance of peer review and the role of publishers and learned societies. The statement also reiterates the findings of the UK’s Finch Report of last year, namely that making publicly funded, peer-reviewed, published scientific research increasingly accessible will ‘accelerate research, drive innovation, and benefit the economy.’

To accommodate for the greater demand for data sharing alongside article publication open access publisher BioMed Central has developed a number of innovative journals and partnerships. From GigaScience, the big data genomics journal published in collaboration with the BGI, to an agreement with LabArchives that allows BioMed Central authors up to 100 MB of free storage in an online ‘notebook’ for research associated data. A number of its journals, including BMC Research Notes also provide a novel article type – a data note – that allows authors to submit data sets (either as associated files or via a link to an accessible deposition in a data repository) with a short accompanying report, separate to a full results article.

One area in particular that is receiving increasing attention and loud calls for greater openness is clinical trial research. The AllTrials initiative was founded early in 2013, and, although UK based, has international scope and ambitions. The campaign calls on governments to demand that all clinical trial research be published, and clinical trial data made publicly available within the constraints of ensuring anonymity of sensitive medical information. The campaign is supported by a number of publishers, societies and institutions, including the BMJ (co-founders of the initiative), BioMed Central, the Wellcome Trust, and GalxoSmith Kline. The campaign also has support from the European Patients Forum, which comprises 61 member bodies and over 150 million members, signalling the strengthening call from the public for transparency and accountability in the reporting of scientific research, especially that funded by public money.

The statement from the G8 science ministers is a step toward recognising this shift in public opinion and research demands. The outcomes of the G8 summit this week could kick start an international movement in opening up research and sharing data.

Janet Lees, OCLC Europe, the Middle East and Africa Community Liaison, has announced plans to retire after 31 years with the worldwide library cooperative.

Ms. Lees was among the first OCLC employees to be based outside the United States. She helped establish the OCLC office in Birmingham, England, joining the organization in January 1982. She was instrumental in making OCLC relevant in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Ms. Lees developed mutually beneficial relationships with libraries, cooperatives and other institutions across Europe and into the Middle East and Africa. She helped create longstanding relationships between OCLC and a number of distributors, including DBC (Denmark), DOC6 (Spain), IFnet (Italy), ITS (Eastern Europe) and particularly SABINET in South Africa, which helped bring many national groups of libraries into WorldCat and OCLC membership.

Ms. Lees served as Managing Director of OCLC EMEA from 1996 until 2002. After OCLC completed its merger with PICA that year, she was named Director of Sales for the combined operation. She served in that position until becoming Community Liaison for EMEA in January 2005.

“Janet Lees is widely respected in the library community for the depth and breadth of her knowledge and experience, as well as her generosity in sharing that knowledge,” said Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO. “She played a major role in creating and supporting the OCLC regional council structure that was introduced in 2008. She has worked tirelessly to inspire a commitment to membership in EMEA libraries, and has seen participation in the OCLC cooperative and in regional elections grow substantially over the years. We are grateful to Janet for her outstanding, dedicated service to OCLC and libraries worldwide.”

During her tenure, Ms. Lees has attended 19 IFLA conferences and visited 45 countries on behalf of OCLC.

OCLC completed the development work to convert the underlying structure for its WorldCatdatabase to Apache HBase, a distributed platform in use by many global information providers, including Facebook, Adobe and Salesforce.com. This marks the conclusion of a significant technical update to the WorldCat database of more than 300 million library records and more than 2 billion library holdings that will offer new options for data analysis and faster service to libraries and their users.

The Apache Hadoop software collection is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers. HBase is a top-level Apache Software Foundation project built on Hadoop that provides major data handling improvements for these very large datasets. OCLC WorldShare applications for library management, resource sharing, metadata and discovery rely on access to a variety of large and growing datasets, including the WorldCat database.

“This is a very exciting technology transition and service upgrade,” said Greg Zick, OCLC’s Vice President of Global Engineering. “As we move our OCLC services to the cloud on the WorldShare platform, we need to find ways to optimize performance of our operations on large datasets like local and national catalogs and authority datasets. This upgrade will also help ongoing quality improvement efforts, record matching and merging and will enable new representations and uses of the cooperative’s data.”

The sheer scope of OCLC members’ cooperative data is one driver of this change, as HBase provides better handling of very large datasets. In addition, HBase and Hadoop allow OCLC to represent library information in new ways for use in e-content and linked data systems while providing more consistent, reliable and faster service to libraries and their users.

Ron Buckley, Senior OCLC Technology Manager and leader of the Hadoop migration team, will be discussing this effort with leaders in the database management field at the 2013 HBaseCon conference in San Francisco on June 13, 2013.

“Our results have been significant,” said Mr. Buckley. “Our hardware storage requirements have been considerably reduced, and our overall footprint simplified to support growth. We have seen large gains in performance for some major data operations where execution time has been slashed from days to hours. This upgrade lets us explore new areas such as detailed analytics and enriched relationships that will increase the value of the cooperative’s data for all libraries.”

Hadoop provides these enhancements, in part, by scaling data services across hundreds or even thousands of computers, each with several processor cores. This efficiently distributes large amounts of work across a set of machines, allowing for greater flexibility, speed and dependability. OCLC is running Hadoop across more than 150 servers in three clusters.

Michael Stack, Software Engineer at Cloudera, Chair of the Apache HBase Project Management Committee and keynote for the HBaseCon event, is enthusiastic about OCLC’s work in this area. “I have had multiple discussions with Ron Buckley and know that after careful study and much preparatory work, OCLC has pulled off a smooth transition,” Mr. Stack commented. “This is my favorite HBase deploy. It is about libraries, my favorite institution, and it is about Apache HBase as an enabling technology that allows OCLC to do more. It is a great story.”

This technology has already had an impact on OCLC functionality and services. The recent addition of linked data elements to WorldCat.org relies on the features available in Hadoop. Also, the new WorldShare Metadata Collection Manager service takes advantage of the data handling benefits of its distributed infrastructure.

“We credit the success of this venture to our remarkable migration team,” noted Mr. Zick. “Because of their intelligent and hard work, this significant transition has had a minimal impact on our members’ use of existing OCLC services. The team was able to replicate the production version of WorldCat in HBase, write a completely new access layer, and then incrementally move existing products and services to the new infrastructure with minimal disruption.”