Announcement: Workshop “Metadata and Persistent Identifiers for Social and Economic Data”

The German Data Forum (RatSWD), the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, nestor - the German Competence network for digital preservation, the International Data Service Center of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IDSC) and the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (ZBW) will be hosting a joint workshop on the subject of

„Metadata and Persistent Identifiers for Social and Economic Data“

which will take place on 7th and 8th May 2012 in Berlin and to which you are cordially invited.

Attendance is free, registration is requested.
For registration and more information, please visit:  http://www.ratswd.de/pid_2012

The full program ist attached below. Additional information may be found on our download page and here.

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Berlin publishes strategy for Open Data of the public administration

On Friday, Stefan Krempl wrote an article for heise.de about the new strategy of the Senate of Berlin to extend its Open Data Portal. Open Data Berlin is the first open data project in Germany for the public administration. In the UK this is much more common and already a regular service.

In Berlin, the Senate published a strategy document in cooperation with the Fraunhofer-Institute FOCUS, where the future of the project is designed – including demands for better organizational structures, coherent metadata schema and useful applications.

In the medium term, all enactments and protocols -if not classified as confidential- should be made available to the public on the platform. 
In their paper, Fraunhofer proposes to publish these documents in open formats only – a useful attempt especially when we’re thinking about the long-term preservation of these data. 
Beside  textual documents, datasets of the public administration and applications are also published.

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Incentives for Data Sharing: £8.000 a year for promoting open data!

When I first heard, that the Panton Fellowships offer the possibility to get £8.000 bucks in a year for making scientific data open, I thought this was a joke. Some kind of an idea that might only cause windfall gains by scientists needing a funding budget. But it is worth taking a deeper look:

The Panton Fellowships are funded by the Open Society Foundations. The coordination is done by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Fellowshops will be awarded to scientists who actively promote open data in science.

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Data Availability Policy: American Economic Review

As announced in my previous blogpost, I ‘m starting the presentation of some data availability policies and replication policies with the American Economic Review (AER). The AER is a flagship of the economic profession and one of the top ranked journals in this scientific discipline.
The AER was published in 1911 for the first time. Only 7 – 10 percent of the submissions are accepted and later on published.

The AER adopted a so called replication policy in 1986 – despite the fact that studies (for example by Dewald, Thursby and Anderson) already claimed, that a replication policy is not enough to promote replicable results.
In their policy, the Review pledged authors to provide datasets and code for processing the data to other scientists that are interested in replicating the results on request.

Replication policies have often failed, even if the corresponding author is willing to support other researchers…and I imagine that this szenario is not very common …After publishing an article, authors mostly don’t have incentives to prepare the data and code for other researchers. It costs time and the rewards the scientific system pays for sharing data often are marginal.

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Announcement: New section – Data Availability Policies in Economic Journals

Today, I want to introduce a new regular section here on edawax.de. Within the next weeks and months I’ m going to discuss some of the data availability policies we found during our investigations for our work package 2.

Even though you’ll find a lot of the information posted here in a condensed report by the end of spring, I thought it would be beneficial to our readers to get some preliminary information about the things we are currently doing. Of course I would be very happy to discuss the policies presented and some of my thoughts with you. So please feel free to comment or to send me an email.

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Report describes information practices in the physical sciences

The Research Information Network (RIN), the Institute of Physics (IOP), Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) and the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in the UK have just commissioned a report that examines information practices in the physical sciences. It follows the previous case studies in the life sciences and the humanities.

This report uses seven case studies (particle physics, astrophysics gamma ray burst, nuclear physics, chemistry, earth science, nanoscience and users of the zooniverse platform) to understand how researchers in the physical sciences find, access, use and share information.

In the introduction the authors stated:

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RatSWD-Newsletter: EDaWaX Project introduced

The German Data Forum (RatSWD) has just published its current newsletter. Beside many other interesting articles, book reviews, event notes etc., on page 3 a description of the EDaWaX-Project is included (see below).

I’m sorry for our international visitors, but the article and the whole newsletter is available in German only.

Additionally I want to point the attention of our readers to another publication (in German) of the German Data Forum: Prof. Gerd G. Wagner and D. Huschka published a comment on the nature magazine’s special issue “data replication and reproducibility.”

You’ll find the working paper 194 “Datenverfügbarkeit reicht nicht, um Replikationsstudien zur Routine zu machen” in the Download section of this blog or on the website of the German Data Forum.

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US Research Works Act Proposal – a new approach to attack Open Access? #Updates

In the course of my research for data policies of economic scholarly journals for the work package 2 of the EDaWaX-project, I stumbled on the proposal H.R. 3699 of the US House of Representatives with claims “To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector”

First I thought, >okay, just another proposal, nothing to worry about<, but when I read more about it, my opinion changed.

From my personal point of view this proposal would seriously threaten public access to federally funded research in the US, when it becomes law. And the question following is, what will happen in Europe, when the publishers succeed in the US?

And this is not only my own perspective: There are libraries and researchers that got upset, too.

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Introducing DRYAD

Today I want to introduce Dryad – maybe many of you know it already because it is not a project that has  just started, but a repository that was initially released in 2008.

As mentioned, Dryad is an international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences, including biomedicine.

Dryad enables scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies.

Dryad is governed by a consortium of journals that collaboratively promote data archiving and ensure the sustainability of the repository. Actually, Dryad contains 1228 data packages and 2953 data files, associated with articles in 100 journals.

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OpenAIREplus launched – linking peer-reviewed literature to associated data

In early December 2011 the Open Aire Plus Project was launched – the project is designed to run 30 months and is funded by the EU. The aim of the project is providing cross-links from publications to data and funding schemes.

OpenAireplus brings together 41 pan-European partners, including three cross-disciplinary research communities.

The project will build on the efforts of the OpenAIRE Project, that enables Researchers to deposit their research publications that were funded by ERA or FP7 into OA-Repositories.

In the copurse of the project, the current publication repository networks will be expanded to attract data providers from domain specific scientific areas.

Creating a robust, participatory service for the cross-linking of peer-reviewed scientific publications and associated datasets is the principal goal of OpenAIREplus. As scholarly communication touches upon many disciplines, the project’s horizontal outreach will facilitate collaboration across data infrastructures, providing information to scientists, non-scientists as well as to providers of value-added services. The project will establish an e-Infrastructure to harvest, enrich and store the metadata of Open Access scientific datasets. Underlying technical structures will be deployed to support the management of and inter-linking between associated scientific data.

Dr. Norbert Lossau, Scientific Coordinator of the project and Director of Goettingen State and University Library states:

“The participatory design of OpenAIREplus will seamlessly guide the researcher to Open Access research data. The experienced consortium will pave the way to support the research work of European scientists and open up the road to multi-disciplinary science”