Survey on Big Data gathers input from materials community
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Survey on Big Data gathers input from materials community “
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ig Data” and “Open Data” are terms increasingly heard when referring to the vast amount of digital data that are available today and are topics of great interest in the scientific community. The outcome of discussions on these topics will play a major role in the progress of scientific enquiry in the future. Any conclusions could also affect the policies adopted by government and private funding agencies, publishers and editors, universities and private research institutions, and individual research groups worldwide. To set the stage for these discussions, the Materials Research Society (MRS) and The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) find it important to identify key areas of possible agreement and disagreement at the outset. So earlier this year, MRS and TMS established a committee to develop a survey to assess the current thinking on these key topics within the greater materials community. The diverse committee included members representing various segments of the materials science and engineering community, and in the spring of 2013, they launched a 25-question “MRS-TMS Big Data Survey.” “The MRS-TMS Big Data/Open Data Survey provides a needed baseline foundation for building community discussions and future surveys on data and access to accelerate the discovery of new materials,” said Laura Bartolo, survey committee member and professor and director of the Center for Materials Informatics, Kent State University. In mid-February, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum that stated that in order to achieve the Administration’s commitment to increase access to federally funded, published
Of the 25 questions in the survey, 23 included standard multiple choice answers that participants could choose, as well as an “other” option so they could explain answers that did not fit into one of the standard categories. Comment boxes were appended to several survey questions. The last two questions on specific developments were openended and gave the respondents an opportunity to provide feedback on the evolution of tools and data, as well as their thoughts on the broad areas of big data and open data. There were 675 respondents when the survey was closed on June 3, of which 73% completed the survey. The other 27% responded to most of the questions but did not finish the survey. Responses from all participants are included here, whether or not they finished the survey. Sixty percent of respondents were from the United States, followed by Germany, the United Kingdom, India, Japan, and Canada, with about 3% each. Overall, 64% were from North America, 17% from Europe, and 13% from Asia. Of the respondents, 47% were from academia, 27% from industry, and 14% from government. The remainder were from small business, nonprofit professional organizations, and other unspecified groups. Forty percent identified themselves as scientists/engineers, 26% as university professors/faculty, 11% as executive/management, 7% as p
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