Shannon Bohle provides an excellent overview of the value of open data and evaluates new and suggested open data tools when it comes to making the most of the open access and open data.

“From a business perspective, the management of open data in the health sciences, for example, holds both the potential to reduce losses and increase profits. Preserving, storing, and retrieving data in a manageable fashion, then, will affect not only data consumers but also data producers.

” In medicine, several online tools allow patients to better manage their health care through a Personal Health Record (PHR) including: Microsoft HealthVault,PatientsLikeMe, getHealtZ, onpatient, WebMD Health Record, and Patient Ally. Other tools include EM data analysis and visualization of the brain like NeuroTrace. CARMEN (Code, Analysis, Repository and Modeling for e-Neuroscience) in the UK is a virtual neurophysiology laboratory. Amira was designed for data analysis and visualization in the life sciences along with MeVisLab for medical image processing and visualization.ClinicalTrials.gov Protocol Data Element Definitions and Infobuttons are useful when working with data in the health sciences. Standard tools include PubMed, PubMed Central, MedlinePlus, and GenBank.”