Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2012!

As every year, the christmas tree in front of my office window reminds me that the year 2011 is going to end soon…it’s time to thank our project partners  for a successfull start of the project and a valuable cooperation. Furthermore, I want to thank all readers and commentators for your support in the last few months!

Since the start of the project to this day, 1000 readers visited our blog. In my eyes, this is a remarkable number for the two months and a few days since starting this. Thank you very much!

In the course of the next year we expect that even more people will visit us, because for 2012 we have a full agenda…

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Nature Magazine Special Issue: Data Replication & Repoducibility

The nature magazine has just published a special issue about data replication and reproducibility.

In their introduction the authors are claiming that replication is considered the scientific gold standard. To give a broader view about replication, the journal explores some of the issues associated with the replication of results in different scientific disciplines as for example primate cognition and behaviour research, computer sciences, biology and climate change studies.

Worth reading is the Editorial by J. Crocker and L. Cooper that is dealing with the fraud of Diederik Stapel and raises the question “what could be done to protect science and the public from fraud in the future?”. The answer of the authors, both psychologists, is:

“Greater transparency with data, including depositing data in repositories where they can be accessed by other scientists […], might have sped up detection of this fraud, and it would certainly make researchers more careful about the analyses that they publish.”

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DwB project invites researchers to apply for access to Secure Data Service

The Data without Boundaries  project (DwB) supports equal and easy access to official microdata for the European Research Area, within a structured framework where responsibilities and liability are equally shared.The project assumes that a comprehensive and easy-to-access research data infrastructure enables researchers to continuously produce cutting-edge research and reliable policy evaluations.

Especially the existing wealth of official microdata, currently under-used and held behind national, legislative, technical, and cultural borders is an important source for science and research. DwB claims that these borders  can be crossed over with cooperation and political will.

DwB contributes to the creating of an integrated model where the best solutions for access to official statistical microdata are available, irrespective of national boundaries, yet flexible enough to fit national arrangements.

DwB aims to enhance researchers’ transnational access to official micro data through coordination of existing infrastructures, as the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) and the European Statistical System (ESS).

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Project DaMaRO at University of Oxford

DaMaRO (Data Management Rollout at Oxford) is a collaborative project between several departments within the university: Oxford University Computing Services, the Bodleian Libraries, and Research Services. It is funded by JISC and will run until March 2013.

The aim of the project is creating a research data management policy for the University and the infrastructure to enable researchers to comply with it.

DaMaRO will take the outputs of the various research data management project that the University has been engaged in over the last few years and combines them into a better-integrated suite of tools and discovery mechanisms that will support researchers throughout the data life-cycle, from planning to re-use.

Of particular note is the ‘DataFinder’ tool that DaMaRO will be developing. This will enable the discovery of data hosted in various places around the University and beyond.

Behind the scenes, DataFinder will be able to automatically gather metadata from each of the tools and repositories it connects to, assign DOIs where they are not already assigned, and ensure that the metadata complies with the national DataCite standards. Furthermore, DataFinder will make the metadata it gathers available as linked data, and also map it to the CERIF standard, so that alerts can be issued to compatible research management systems when new project outputs are made available.

Beside software development, the DaMaRO Project will develop data management trainings and documentations for researchers.

SageCite-Project releases interviews with biosciences editors on citing and linking data

The SageCite project, funded by JISC, is releasing interviews with the editors of two leading journals in the Biosciences.  The two interviews explore a large range of issues concerning data, scholarly communications and publishers, the links between data and publications and interoperability between data repositories and publishers.