Open Data is always a big point we discuss with startups because with shared data everyone can build more powerful solutions. The objective of this movement is to take information held by the public sector and lay all the cards on the table. But there is an underlying problem, either the datasets are not compiled for ease of distribution and hooking into or it’s too much work to setup a server to share the information and of course email sizes are limited thus not allowing for large and useful data to be shared.
Academic Torrents is taking a step to flatten all the obstacles in attaining enormous datasets – for researchers, by researchers. Their platform is a “scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant repository of data, with blazing fast download speeds’. Some of the datasets you’ll be ready to find already include NOAA Weather Data 2011, Arizona State University Flixster Data Set, or the UK Road Safety Data 1979 to 2004 to name just a few.
Access to academic papers on the Effectiveness of Cyber security Competitions and data collections from NASA are all at your fingertips. Because the founders Joseph Paul Cohen and Henry Z Lo “aim of this site is to create the infrastructure to allow open access journals to operate at low cost. By facilitating file transfers, the journal can focus on its core mission of providing world-class research. After peer review the paper can be indexed on this site and disseminated throughout our system.”
All files uploaded are licensed to legally re-share and transfers utilize the commonly known bittorent technology but now for legal and very useful data. The system can also become a foundation for new open-access publishing, which has been difficult for government data holders. And for everyone this torrents system gives access to blazing fast download speeds and a site bringing datasets into once place aggregating the content for sharing, distribution, and research reproduction.