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Record W4414329387 · doi:10.29379/jedem.v17i3.1094

Insights from the www.openbydefault.ca database project

2025· article· en· W4414329387 on OpenAlexaffabout
Matt Malone

Bibliographic record

VenueJeDEM - eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicDigital and Traditional Archives Management
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Ottawa
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGovernment (linguistics)LegislationConceptualizationWork (physics)Open governmentOpen data

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Despite Canada’s history of public records access legislation and its commitment to open government policies that seek to advance the disclosure of government records, significant quantities of Canadian federal government information remain not only inaccessible but vulnerable to destruction. This article describes the www.openbydefault.ca project, which aims to preserve and publicly disclose federal government records released through formal Access to Information Act requests by making them immediately available online. From concept to implementation, Open by Default underwent many developments in its life cycle. This article examines the evolution of this project, including as it pertains to data acquisition and processing, database and website design and development, and document storage and hosting, as well as project sustainability and evolution. Using primarily a project development methodology that outlines the evolution of the project during the period from conceptualization to launch, this article discusses and analyzes how the research for the project was carried out and provides a framework to allow researchers to understand how the work might be replicated in future efforts to make government information more accessible.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.023
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.039
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesOpen science
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.997
Threshold uncertainty score0.952

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0230.039
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0040.010
Science and technology studies0.0130.009
Scholarly communication0.0150.007
Open science0.0030.007
Research integrity0.0020.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.032
GPT teacher head0.257
Teacher spread0.225 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueJeDEM - eJournal of eDemocracy and Open GovernmentSame topicDigital and Traditional Archives ManagementFrench-language works237,207