exploring open academia

Casts

Cory Doctorow on Aaron Swartz and Much More…

Portrait, the office, Clerkenwell, London (by Paula Mariel Salischiker, pausal.co.uk, CC-BY).tif

Continuing our exploration into the life of Aaron Swartz, Epistemicast has been lucky enough to grab an interview with Aaron’s friend, early couch-surfing host and tireless fellow activist Cory Doctorow. A New York Times best-selling author, we explored Cory’s own views on the world of Free and Open Source Software, Open Access and Open Academia, as well as getting some touching personal insights...

Associate Professor Devan Ray Donaldson on Research Data Sharing and Evaluating a Data Repository

This short edition of Epistemicast revisits our archive to highlight parts of a previous interview with Associate Professor Devan Ray Donaldson around his 2022 paper on data sharing and research data management in the Journal Nature. In particular, we thought it was well worth redrawing attention to the Rubric which Donaldson and his colleague Joshua Koepke developed to help research scientists...

Exploring The LEGACY of Aaron Swartz

In this episode of Epistemicast we dive into the inspirational legacy of Aaron Swartz. A visionary entrepreneur who co-founded and sold Reddit by age 20, Swartz’s true passion lay in harnessing the web’s potential for humanity. Among his many contributions to open source and free culture, he was instrumental in shaping the technical framework for Creative Commons and the RSS web feed...

A focus group study on data sharing and research data management

There are growing calls that data from publicly funded research should be publicly available. And, while many academic institutions across the globe now mandate data sharing as part of a data management plan, there is often a gap in the training available to researchers. Our guest on this edition of Epistemicast has sought to analyse and address this challenge. In an inspirational paper in the...

Challenges of digitizing information in museums and science institutions

This episode of Epistemicast explores the challenges of digitizing information in museums and science institutions. We learn from Hanna’s pragmatic approach and her choice to use an open source repository as a solution to the problem of data being locked away and inaccessible to others. She explains how the repository now, not only serves as a tool for in-house collections, but also as a much...

Digital Humanities in the API Economy

The inner workings of organisations from lean tech start-ups, to government departments and the largest global corporations are all being abstracted into open, standardised and easily accessible Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Shielded from the complexities of the underlying IT systems, the API economy is giving birth to a new breed of online entrepreneurship. How do we get things...

exploring open academia