Open economics data

Earlier this week I attended the Second Open Economics Workshop in Cambridge, MA organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The aim of the workshop is to explore ways in which economics data may be opened and shared more easily. This involves a mixture of technological solutions as well as trying to get the incentives of researchers right. During the conference I learned several things:

• There are numerous initiatives going on that try to make it easy for people to share data online. The Open Science Framework is particularly interesting as it allows you to manage projects as well as collect and version data online. There is also Quandl which is providing a repository. I also like Datahero that provides analysis of data as soon as it is uploaded.
• DataCite is another great initiative that is providing a way of identifying and registering datasets. This seems like a critical first step in opening up data in economics. Ubiquity Press is also pushing on this front. There are also innovations taking place at the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in Social Sciences.
• The World Bank has an incredible and easily accessible data archive.
• Josh Angrist of MIT has personally established the gold standard for open data in economics. All of his papers have both the code and data available online so that anyone can replicate his results. 

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