New Knowledge Exchange Publication: “The Value of Research Data”

Last week I’ve been in Berlin and took part in the workshop “Making Data Count: Research data availability and research assessment” hosted by Knowledge Exchange (KE), a 2005 established cooperation between five research funders.

The aim of the workshop was to bring experts and stakeholders from research institutions, universities, scholarly societies and funding agencies together in order to review, discuss and build on possibilities to implement the culture of sharing and to integrate publication of data into research assessment procedures. Read the rest of this entry »

NISO and NFAIS publish Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the National Federation for Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) have published a new Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials (NISO RP-15-2013).

Supplemental materials are increasingly being added to journal articles, but until now there has been no recognized set of practices to guide in the selection, delivery, discovery, and preservation of these materials.

To address this gap, NISO and NFAIS jointly sponsored an initiative to establish best practices that would provide guidance to publishers and authors for management of supplemental materials and would address related problems for librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators.

The Supplemental Materials project involved two teams working in tandem: one to address business practices and one to focus on technical issues. This new publication is the combined outcome of the two groups’ work.

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GESIS publishes “Guidelines for the Management of Research Data – Social Sciences Survey Data”

GESIS - the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences has just released the technical report “Guidelines for the management of research data -  social sciences survey data.”

The report is available in German only, but the eighty pages thick document covers a lot of important topics:

Starting with some general recommendations for the exploration of the data available at an institution and issues of privacy protection and responsibility for research data, the report also provides a useful checklist for the management of research data in the first chapter.
Other chapters deal with organisational and technical aspects of data preparation and documentation (chapter 2) or organisational and technical issues of safeguarding data and documents (chapter 3).

Chapter 4 discusses metadata standards, focussing on DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) and persistent identificators (DOI -> da|ra, DataCite). Chapter 5 covers perpetual access to research data and some legal questions. The report concludes with an overview of the services GESIS provides for the management of research data, e.g. digital long-term preservation.

ODE Project: New Report on on Best Practices for Citability of Data and on evolving Roles in scholarly Communication

With the ever increasing availability of data, the best way to ensure its sharing and re-use is becoming a prominent issue. Finding data and understanding data are the first steps in such a process and good data citation is an important prerequisite to enable this. New roles are evolving to support researchers in this process with support in managing, archiving, discovering, interpreting and citing data. Read the rest of this entry »

Big Data in the Humanities and Social Siences? Yes – there’s a bunch of it!

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) issued the first public appraisal of the Digging into Data Challenge, an international grant programme first funded by JISC, the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the US National Science Foundation and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Their findings are presented in a report called One Culture - Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, along with a series of recommendations for researchers, administrators, scholarly societies, academic publishers, research libraries, and funding agencies.

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EC-Survey on Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Open Science matters!

These days, the European Commission has just published the results of a consultation regarding accessibility and preservation of digital publications and research data in the European Union.

Commissioner Neelie Kroes, responsible for the digital agenda for Europe, has launched this consultation in July 2011 for seeking views on access to and preservation of digital scientific information – to be more precisely, the survey broached the issues of Open Access for scientific publications, accessibility of research data and digital long term preservation.

The purpose of the consultation was to gather information from as many sources as possible and receive important input for the future development of policy options in the area of scientific information in the digital age.

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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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“A Surfboard for Riding the Wave”: KE action plan on research data presented

Following the report “Riding the Wave: How Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data” that was released 2010 by the high level expert group on research data, the Knowledge Exchange (KE) partners have embraced this vision and commissioned a report that translates Riding the Wave into actions for the four partner countries and beyond.

The report was presented today during a KE workshop in Bonn.

The Report “A Surfboard for Riding the Wave” builds on the 2010 report and presents an overview of the present situation with regard to research data in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and offers broad outlines for a possible action programme for the four countries in realising the envisaged collaborative data infrastructure.

While the 2010 report of the high level expert group on research data presented a vision for the year 2030, the report of KE concretizes this vision for the four countries.

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Data centres: their use, value and impact

This report provides an analysis of the usage and impact of a number of research data centres, representing a cross-section of research disciplines in the UK.

The study aimed to demonstrate the importance, relevance and benefits of effective sharing and curation of research data for the UK research community. It looked at the long-term usage and impact of data curated by a cross-disciplinary selection of established data centres.

Using quantitative and qualitative approaches, the study gathered evidence on the extent data centres have been useful to the research community. As part of a wider body of work, this evidence will help to build a case for improving data sharing practice in the UK.

The full report is available at the RIN website or here.

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Report: Legal Status of Research Data in four european countries

It is difficult for researchers and those supporting them to understand how open access to research data can be legally obtained and re-used. This is due to the fact that European and national laws vary and researchers work across national boundaries.

A possible approach to providing clarity would be that researchers assign a licence to their data. This practice could be incorporated in a code of conduct for researchers.
The report ‘The legal status of research data in the Knowledge Exchange partner countries’ was commissioned by Knowledge Exchange (KE) and written by the Centre for Intellectual Property Law (CIER). The aim of the report was to provide clarity by analysing the intellectual property regimes in the four KE countries and European database law.

Moreover, the report provides three recommendations to achieve better access: making contractual arrangements with authors, harmonisation of European copyright law and setting up of policies on commercial interests.

You’ll find the full report here. The the four national reports are available here.

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Reference Book “Research Data Management” published

In the course of Frankfurt Book Fair, a new reference book for reasearch data managenent was announced.

The reference book,  published by Prof. Büttner, Prof. Hobohm (both FH Potsdam) and Lars Müller, gains insights in the management of research data in different scientific communities.

Beside other topics the reference book deals with the lifecycle of research data, data policies, judical subjects, metadata and standards, repositories for research data, digital preservation and the  publishing of data.

The refence book is published by Bock and Herchen and additionally is available as open acess publication.

You can download the reference book here.

Drivers and barriers in data sharing [Update]

The ODE project has published a collection of success stories and lessons learned in the area of data sharing, re-use and preservation.

Ten stories have been selected from a series of interviewed carried out to establish a baseline for the drivers and barriers in data exchange.

You will find the full report here.

Update 25-10-2011:
Another report of the ODE project (“Integration of Data and Publications“) is related to the scientific communication and shows actual trends – e.g. it describes how libraries and publishers are dealing with research data and how they make them accessible.

One example: the report lists five abstract researcher requirements for integrating data and publication:

1. Researchers need somewhere to put data and make it safe for reuse
2. Researchers need to control its sharing and access
3. Researchers need the ability to integrate data and publication
4. Researchers need to get credit for data as a first class research object
5. Researchers need someone to pay for the costs of data availability and re-use

Quite interesting findings for our EDaWaX-Project- especially requirement 3 is a goal of our project…

An executive summary of the ODE-report is available here.