Kevin Cowtan spoke about the significant benefits he has gained from openly sharing his research data at the first Open Data in Practice event at the University of York on 15 November 2018.

1. Kevin Cowtan
Open data and the scientific gift culture

2. Who am I?
● CCP4-funded Research Fellow in
York Structural Biology Laboratory
(Department of Chemistry)
● Developer of computational methods for X-ray
crystallography and electron microscopy
● An 'accidental' climate scientist.
● Chair of the university Research Data
Management group

3. Why am I talking to you?
A career built on open software and open data...

4. Crystallography software...
● Expensive
● Outdated
● Hard to learn

5. Coot...

6. Intellectual property in the 1990s
High priority on
commercialisation.
We constantly needed to
explain:
● What “free software” was,
● Why we were doing it.

7. What do we get out of it?
Academic impact...
● Coot > 20,000 citations
− 10 new citations/day
● Several other papers
> 1,000 citations

8. Gift culture
Science works because
we share our results.
Bernard of Chartres:
“dwarves on the shoulders of
giants”

9. Global warming “hiatus”
This difference between simulated and observed trends could
be caused by some combination of (a) internal climate variability,
(b) missing or incorrect radiative forcing and (c) model response error.
the [temperature] trend over 1998–2012 is estimated to be
around one-third to one-half of the trend over 1951–2012
IPCC 5th
Assessment
Report, 2013

10. Hiatus?

11. Monthly updates
● Update with latest data
every month
● 1-2 hours work/month
− occasionally more
● A “temporary” effort
− 4 years and counting!
● Citations...

12. NASA/NOAA
Annual climate
press conference

13. NASA/NOAA
Annual climate
press conference

14. Benefits of being a data provider
● Citations
● Collaborations
− REF returnable papers
● Grants
− BBSRC grants, CCP4 fellowship, NERC large grant
● Commercial income

15. Survivorship bias

16. Evidence
● Open data
increases citations
● Open data
generates
economic value

17. How does it work?

18. How does it work?
Any time I start a piece of work on a funded project, or have
an unfunded idea which might be publishable, I start
preparing data for release…
● Create a project folder
● Create an experiment folder in the project folder
● Start adding the data I am going to use

19. How does it work?
Every time I do or update an experiment:
● Clone the folder (or use version control)
● Make a note of the folder name and the new experiment
When I report the results (paper or otherwise):
● Archive and release any experiments which contributes

20. How does it work?
Other benefits:
● Avoids having to redo everything to produce the
supporting data for a paper.
− And reduces mistakes
● Reviewers ask for alternative approaches – easy
● Updating results with newer data - easy
● Others reuse my code/data and ask me to be a co-author

21. Conclusions
Open data can benefit you, the university and the public.
● More collaborations, papers and grants
● Benefit to the economy: REF impact studies
● Benefit to the department: REF environment
● Benefit to you: collaborations, papers, grants and…

22. Conclusions
Open data can benefit you, the university and the public.
● More collaborations, papers and grants
● Benefit to the economy: REF impact studies
● Benefit to the department: REF environment
● Benefit to you: collaborations, papers, grants and…
…better science!

23. Thank you for listening!