Rising Resistance to Brexit? Will the EPA Open Data site be shut down?

Composite image of Europe at night, 2016: Credits: NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Suomi NPP VIIRS data from Miguel Román, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Approval from one author to proceed to print after minor correction of proof, also approved Quekett Bulletin to go ahead with printers. After that both Jane and I driven to distraction re upcoming events this week. at least we went out and bought some good cakes and biscuits from Daily Bread for the Community Cafe tomorrow. Finished off the working day with starting to edit the Norris photos from Friday. This evening, first play with the microscope for ages. A PMS box on Honey bee parts did not sound promising, but found unexpected beauty in a sea of delicate fronded hairs on the abdomen and recurved wing hooks to photograph.

Apparently Labour has a Brexit strategy, they will scrap the Brexit White paper and emphasise the benefits of the common market and the customs union. Given the current parlous nature of the l;abour party, one might actually have more faith in Open Britain, which is aiming to garner support to remove hard brexiteers from their marginal seats in the upcoming election. Does this mean that we are moving away form a party politics system to an agenda/policy driven one? There also seems to be an increase in younger people registering to vote, which will also raise the pro EU sentiments.

This evening, the Independent claimed that President Trump would be shutting down the open access climate and environmental data of the EPA on Friday 28th April this week. Reading the story and also checking with a Forbes article on the same subject, suggests that this is actually a more complicted situation. The EPA site will be one of many governments sites to close down if POTUS forces a government shutdown by not signing funding bill. The question will then be whether there will be sufficient government funding afterwards for the EPA site when it comes back online.

The story reflects a bigger issue, and that is the susceptibility of centrally held data and systems to failure and loss of funding, or the vagaries of policy changes. Kalev Leetaru, data and society commentator for Forbes looks at the balance between centralised and distributed data and the pros and cons of control being with a major corporation or government in his article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/04/24/no-the-epas-open-data-website-is-not-going-away-the-future-of-open-science-data/#1b42eaab18b5