Data Curation, Open Data, and Research Data Management – Page 36

"Elsevier Implements Data Citation Standards to Encourage and Reward Authors for Sharing Research Data"

Elsevier has released "Elsevier Implements Data Citation Standards to Encourage and Reward Authors for Sharing Research Data."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced that it has implemented the FORCE11 Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles for over 1800 journals. This means that authors publishing with Elsevier are now able to cite the research data underlying their article, contributing to attribution and encouraging research data sharing with research articles.

The FORCE11 data citation principles were launched in 2014 with the aim to make research data an integral part of the scholarly record.

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"The Durability and Fragility of Knowledge Infrastructures: Lessons Learned from Astronomy"

Christine L. Borgman, Peter T. Darch, Ashley E. Sands, and Milena S. Golshan have self-archived "The Durability and Fragility of Knowledge Infrastructures: Lessons Learned from Astronomy."

Here's an excerpt:

Infrastructures are not inherently durable or fragile, yet all are fragile over the long term. Durability requires care and maintenance of individual components and the links between them. Astronomy is an ideal domain in which to study knowledge infrastructures, due to its long history, transparency, and accumulation of observational data over a period of centuries. Research reported here draws upon a long-term study of scientific data practices to ask questions about the durability and fragility of infrastructures for data in astronomy. Methods include interviews, ethnography, and document analysis. As astronomy has become a digital science, the community has invested in shared instruments, data standards, digital archives, metadata and discovery services, and other relatively durable infrastructure components. Several features of data practices in astronomy contribute to the fragility of that infrastructure. These include different archiving practices between ground- and space-based missions, between sky surveys and investigator-led projects, and between observational and simulated data. Infrastructure components are tightly coupled, based on international agreements. However, the durability of these infrastructures relies on much invisible work—cataloging, metadata, and other labor conducted by information professionals. Continual investments in care and maintenance of the human and technical components of these infrastructures are necessary for sustainability.

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"Provenance in Support of ANDS’ Four Transformations"

Andrew E. Treloar and Mingfang Wu have published "Provenance in Support of ANDS' Four Transformations" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

This article introduces the provenance activities that are being carried out at the Australia National Data Services (ANDS). Since its beginning, ANDS has been promoting four data transformations so that Australia's research data become more valuable and reusable by researchers. Among many other activities that enable the four transformations, ANDS has been encouraging ANDS partners to capture and describe rich context at the time when a data collection is created. In 2015, ANDS funded a number of external projects that had provenance components. In addition, ANDS is working on the interoperability between the schema that is used by the ANDS research data registration and discovery service – Research Data Australia (RDA) – and the W3C recommended provenance standard, Provenance Ontology (PROV-O), and investigating how to enrich the schema to access provenance information. The article concludes by discussing the lessons we learnt and our future planned activity.

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"Towards a Collaborative National Research Data Management Network"

Chuck Humphrey, Kathleen Shearer, and Martha Whitehead have published "Towards a Collaborative National Research Data Management Network" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper describes the plans and strategies to develop Portage, a national network of sustainable, shared services for research data management (RDM) in Canada. A description of the RDM context in Canada is provided. This environment has heightened expectations around the Government of Canada's Open Science plans and includes deliverables aimed at improving access to publications and data resulting from federally funded scientific activities. At the same time, a recent environmental scan published by Canada's three federal research granting councils reveals significant gaps in services, infrastructure, and funding mechanisms to support RDM. In addition, Canada's RDM environment consists of stakeholders from a variety of communities with minimal ongoing coordination or cooperation.

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"The Location of the Citation: Changing Practices in How Publications Cite Original Data in the Dryad Digital Repository"

Christine Mayo, Todd J. Vision, and Elizabeth A. Hull have published "The Location of the Citation: Changing Practices in How Publications Cite Original Data in the Dryad Digital Repository" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

While stakeholders in scholarly communication generally agree on the importance of data citation, there is not consensus on where those citations should be placed within the publication – particularly when the publication is citing original data. Recently, CrossRef and the Digital Curation Center (DCC) have recommended as a best practice that original data citations appear in the works cited sections of the article. In some fields, such as the life sciences, this contrasts with the common practice of only listing data identifier(s) within the article body (intratextually). We inquired whether data citation practice has been changing in light of the guidance from CrossRef and the DCC. We examined data citation practices from 2011 to 2014 in a corpus of 1,125 articles associated with original data in the Dryad Digital Repository. The percentage of articles that include no reference to the original data has declined each year, from 31% in 2011 to 15% in 2014. The percentage of articles that include data identifiers intratextually has grown from 69% to 83%, while the percentage that cite data in the works cited section has grown from 5% to 8%. If the proportions continue to grow at the current rate of 19-20% annually, the proportion of articles with data citations in the works cited section will not exceed 90% until 2030.

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The State of Open Data

Figshare has released The State of Open Data.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The report gathers insights and narratives from leading professionals in the open data space from around the globe and a foreword from Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Chairman and co-founder of the Open Data Institute (ODI), UK.

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Research Data Services in Europe’s Academic Research Libraries

LIBER has released Research Data Services in Europe's Academic Research Libraries by Carol Tenopir et al.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Almost all of Europe's academic research libraries are working collaboratively, within and outside of their institutions, to help ensure that the scientific data of today is curated properly, so it can be accessed, shared and reused by future generations. . . .

The survey—which reflects answers from a representative sample of research libraries in 22 countries across Europe—also revealed that:

Libraries are currently offering more consultative-type RDS services (eg. how to find information on Data Management Plans, metadata standards, or data citation practices) than technological services (eg. own storage solutions);

Less than half of libraries say their institutions currently have policies relating to RDS;

Two-thirds of library directors express strongly that libraries need to offer RDS to remain relevant.

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"Developments in Research Data Management in Academic Libraries: towards an Understanding of Research Data Service Maturity"

Andrew M. Cox et al. have self-archived "Developments in Research Data Management in Academic Libraries: towards an Understanding of Research Data Service Maturity."

Here's an excerpt:

This paper reports an international study of research data management (RDM) activities, services and capabilities in higher education libraries. It presents the results of a survey covering higher education libraries in Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the UK. The results indicate that libraries have provided leadership in RDM, particularly in advocacy and policy development. Service development is still limited, focused especially on advisory and consultancy services (such as data management planning support and data-related training), rather than technical services (such as provision of a data catalogue, and curation of active data). Data curation skills development is underway in libraries, but skills and capabilities are not consistently in place and remain a concern. Other major challenges include resourcing, working with other support services, and achieving 'buy in' from researchers and senior managers.

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"Overly Honest Data Repository Development"

Colleen Fallaw et al. have published "Overly Honest Data Repository Development" in Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

After a year of development, the library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has launched a repository, called the Illinois Data Bank (https://databank.illinois.edu/), to provide Illinois researchers with a free, self-serve publishing platform that centralizes, preserves, and provides persistent and reliable access to Illinois research data. This article presents a holistic view of development by discussing our overarching technical, policy, and interface strategies. By openly presenting our design decisions, the rationales behind those decisions, and associated challenges this paper aims to contribute to the library community's work to develop repository services that meet growing data preservation and sharing needs.

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"Understanding and Sustaining the Role of Academic Libraries in Research Data Management"

Ashley Sands has published "Understanding and Sustaining the Role of Academic Libraries in Research Data Management" in the UpNext Blog.

Here's an excerpt:

IMLS recently announced 41 awards made through the National Leadership Grants for Libraries program (NLG), the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian program (LB21), and Sparks! Ignition Grants for Libraries program (Sparks). Among these awards, we are pleased to support a number of projects seeking to understand and sustain the role of academic libraries in research data management. The three projects highlighted in this post represent a total investment of nearly $200,000.

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"Data Management in the Long Tail: Science, Software, and Service"

Christine L. Borgman et al. has published "Data Management in the Long Tail: Science, Software, and Service" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

Scientists in all fields face challenges in managing and sustaining access to their research data. The larger and longer term the research project, the more likely that scientists are to have resources and dedicated staff to manage their technology and data, leaving those scientists whose work is based on smaller and shorter term projects at a disadvantage. The volume and variety of data to be managed varies by many factors, only two of which are the number of collaborators and length of the project. As part of an NSF project to conceptualize the Institute for Empowering Long Tail Research, we explored opportunities offered by Software as a Service (SaaS). These cloud-based services are popular in business because they reduce costs and labor for technology management, and are gaining ground in scientific environments for similar reasons. We studied three settings where scientists conduct research in small and medium-sized laboratories. Two were NSF Science and Technology Centers (CENS and C-DEBI) and the third was a workshop of natural reserve scientists and managers. These laboratories have highly diverse data and practices, make minimal use of standards for data or metadata, and lack resources for data management or sustaining access to their data, despite recognizing the need. We found that SaaS could address technical needs for basic document creation, analysis, and storage, but did not support the diverse and rapidly changing needs for sophisticated domain-specific tools and services. These are much more challenging knowledge infrastructure requirements that require long-term investments by multiple stakeholders.

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"Dash: Data Sharing Made Easy at the University of California"

Stephen Abrams et al. have published "Dash: Data Sharing Made Easy at the University of California" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

While the UC Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library supports a growing roster of innovative curation services for University use, most were intended originally to meet the needs of institutional information professionals, such as librarians, archivists, and curators. In order to address the new curation concerns of individual scholars, UC3 realized that it needed to deploy new systems and services optimized for stakeholders with widely divergent experiences, expertise, and expectations. This led to the development of Dash, an online data publication service making campus data sharing easy. While Dash gives the appearance of being a full-fledged repository, in actuality it is only a lightweight overlay layer that sits on top of standards-compliant repositories, such as UC3's existing Merritt curation repository. The Dash service offers intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces for dataset submission, description, publication, and discovery. By imposing minimal prescriptive eligibility and submission requirements; automating and hiding the mechanical details of DOI assignment, data packaging, and repository deposit; and featuring a streamlined, self-service user experience that can be integrated easily into scholarly workflows, Dash is an important new service offering with which UC scholars can meet their RDM obligations.

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"From Plan to Action: Successful Data Management Plan Implementation in a Multidisciplinary Project"

Margaret H. Burnette, Sarah C. Williams, and Heidi J. Imker have published "From Plan to Action: Successful Data Management Plan Implementation in a Multidisciplinary Project" in the Journal of eScience Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

A case study was designed to gather insights from the research group through semi-structured interviews. Questions focused on which of the recommended data management strategies were adopted and how those strategies affected the project in terms of cost, time, effectiveness, and long-term data use.

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State of the Art Report on Open Access Publishing of Research Data in the Humanities

Stefan Buddenbohm et al. have self-archived State of the Art Report on Open Access Publishing of Research Data in the Humanities.

Here's an excerpt:

This report gives an overview of the various aspects that are connected to open access publishing of research data in the humanities. After the introduction, where we give definitions of key concepts, we describe the research data life cycle. We present an overview of the different stakeholders involved and we look into advantages and obstacles for researchers to share research data. Furthermore, a description of the European data repositories is given, followed by certification standards of trusted digital data repositories. The possibility of data citation is important for sharing open data and is also described in this report. We also discuss the standards and use of metadata in the humanities. Finally, we discuss best practice example of open access research data system in the humanities: the French open research data ecosystem.

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"Campus Support Systems for Technical Researchers Navigating Big Data Ethics"

Bonnie Tijerina has published "Campus Support Systems for Technical Researchers Navigating Big Data Ethics" in EDUCAUSE Review.

Here's an excerpt:

A team at Data & Society recently conducted interviews and campus visits with computer science researchers and librarians at eight U.S. universities to examine the role of research librarians in assisting technical researchers as they navigate emerging issues of privacy, ethics, and equitable access to data at different phases of the research process.

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"The Journal Article as a Means to Share Data: A Content Analysis of Supplementary Materials from Two Disciplines"

Jeremy Kenyon, Nancy Sprague, and Edward Flathers have published "The Journal Article as a Means to Share Data: a Content Analysis of Supplementary Materials from Two Disciplines" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION The practice of publishing supplementary materials with journal articles is becoming increasingly prevalent across the sciences. We sought to understand better the content of these materials by investigating the differences between the supplementary materials published by authors in the geosciences and plant sciences. METHODS We conducted a random stratified sampling of four articles from each of 30 journals published in 2013. In total, we examined 297 supplementary data files for a range of different factors. RESULTS We identified many similarities between the practices of authors in the two fields, including the formats used (Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs) and the small size of the files. There were differences identified in the content of the supplementary materials: the geology materials contained more maps and machine-readable data; the plant science materials included much more tabular data and multimedia content. DISCUSSION Our results suggest that the data shared through supplementary files in these fields may not lend itself to reuse. Code and related scripts are not often shared, nor is much 'raw' data. Instead, the files often contain summary data, modified for human reading and use. CONCLUSION Given these and other differences, our results suggest implications for publishers, librarians, and authors, and may require shifts in behavior if effective data sharing is to be realized.

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"Research Data Management in Social Sciences and Humanities: A Survey at the University of Lille (France)"

Joachim Schöpfel and Hélène Prost have published "Research Data Management in Social Sciences and Humanities: A Survey at the University of Lille (France)" in LIBREAS.

Here's an excerpt:

The paper presents results from a campus-wide survey at the University of Lille (France) on research data management in social sciences and humanities. The survey received 270 responses, equivalent to 15% of the whole sample of scientists, scholars, PhD students, administrative and technical staff (research management, technical support services); all disciplines were represented. The responses show a wide variety of practice and usage. The results are discussed regarding job status and disciplines and compared to other surveys. Four groups can be distinguished, i.e. pioneers (20-25%), motivated (25-30%), unaware (30%) and reluctant (5-10%). Finally, the next steps to improve the research data management on the campus are presented.

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"The Pathways of Research Software Preservation: An Educational and Planning Resource for Service Development"

Fernando Rios has published "The Pathways of Research Software Preservation: An Educational and Planning Resource for Service Development" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

Research communities, funders, publishers, and academic libraries have put much effort towards ensuring that research data are preserved. However, the same level of attention has not been given to the associated software used to process and analyze it. As a guide to those tasked with preserving research outputs, a novel visual representation of preservation approaches relevant to research software, termed the Pathways of Research Software Preservation, is presented. The Pathways are discussed in the context of service development within the Data Management Services group at Johns Hopkins University.

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"Towards Narrowing the Curation Gap—Theoretical Considerations and Lessons Learned from Decades of Practice"

Ana Sesartić, Andreas Fischlin, and Matthias Töwe ave published "Towards Narrowing the Curation Gap-Theoretical Considerations and Lessons Learned from Decades of Practice" in the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information.

Here's an excerpt:

Research as a digital enterprise has created new, often poorly addressed challenges for the management and curation of research to ensure continuity, transparency, and accountability. There is a common misunderstanding that curation can be considered at a later point in the research cycle or delegated or that it is too burdensome or too expensive due to a lack of efficient tools. This creates a curation gap between research practice and curation needs. We argue that this gap can be narrowed if curators provide attractive support that befits research needs and if researchers consistently manage their work according to generic concepts consistently from the beginning. A rather uniquely long-term case study demonstrates how such concepts have helped to pragmatically implement a research practice intentionally using only minimalist tools for sustained, self-contained archiving since 1989. The paper sketches the concepts underlying three core research activities. (i) handling of research data, (ii) reference management as part of scholarly publishing, and (iii) advancing theories through modelling and simulation. These concepts represent a universally transferable best research practice, while technical details are obviously prone to continuous change. We hope it stimulates researchers to manage research similarly and that curators gain a better understanding of the curation challenges research practice actually faces.

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"The Academic Data Librarian Profession in Canada: History and Future Directions"

S. Vincent Gray and Elizabeth Hill have self-archived "The Academic Data Librarian Profession in Canada: History and Future Directions."

Here's an excerpt:

From the 1970s onward, Canadians have been active in developing services and establishing structures to support the dissemination of data. In recent years the academic data profession in Canada has largely developed around access to data from the national statistics agency, Statistics Canada, and around the services which have been developed to permit access to these data. This chapter will provide a historical background for these activities and explain how current and emerging trends continue to affect the profession.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 6. Over 560 works. Over 200 works added. Live links. Selected abstracts. OA. CC-BY License. Covers topics such as research data creation, acquisition, metadata, repositories, provenance, management, policies, support services, funding agency requirements, peer review, publication, citation, sharing, reuse, and preservation.

"Scholarly Communication and Data"

Hailey Mooney has self-archived "Scholarly Communication and Data."

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this chapter is to provide foundational knowledge for the data librarian by developing an understanding of the place of data within the current paradigm of networked digital scholarly communication. This includes defining the nature of data and data publications, examining the open science movement and its effects on data sharing, and delving into the challenges inherent to the wider integration of data into the scholarly communication system and the academic library

Preserving Transactional Data

The Digital Preservation Coalition, UK Data Service, and Charles Beagrie Ltd. have released Preserving Transactional Data .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This report tackles the requirements for preserving transactional data and the accompanying challenges facing companies and institutions that aim to re-use these data for analysis or research, presenting the issues and strategies which emphasize preservation practices that facilitate re-use and reproducibility.

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UK Survey of Academics 2015

Ithaka S+R has released UK Survey of Academics 2015.

Here's an excerpt:

This report is the second Ithaka S+R / Jisc / RLUK survey of UK academics. It asks of the UK research community their views on resource discovery, their use of these resources (online and digital), attitudes to research data management, and much more. It provides a powerful insight into how researchers view their own behaviour and the research environment within the UK today.

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"Cloud-Based Big Data Management and Analytics for Scholarly Resources: Current Trends, Challenges and Scope for Future Research"

Samiya Khan, Kashish A. Shakil, and Mansaf Alam have self-archived "Cloud-Based Big Data Management and Analytics for Scholarly Resources: Current Trends, Challenges and Scope for Future Research."

Here's an excerpt:

With the shifting focus of organizations and governments towards digitization of academic and technical documents, there has been an increasing need to use this reserve of scholarly documents for developing applications that can facilitate and aid in better management of research. In addition to this, the evolving nature of research problems has made them essentially interdisciplinary. As a result, there is a growing need for scholarly applications like collaborator discovery, expert finding and research recommendation systems. This research paper reviews the current trends and identifies the challenges existing in the architecture, services and applications of big scholarly data platform with a specific focus on directions for future research.

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"A Vision for Open Cyber-Scholarly Infrastructures"

Costantino Thanos has published "A Vision for Open Cyber-Scholarly Infrastructures" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

The characteristics of modern science, i.e., data-intensive, multidisciplinary, open, and heavily dependent on Internet technologies, entail the creation of a linked scholarly record that is online and open. Instrumental in making this vision happen is the development of the next generation of Open Cyber-Scholarly Infrastructures (OCIs), i.e., enablers of an open, evolvable, and extensible scholarly ecosystem. The paper delineates the evolving scenario of the modern scholarly record and describes the functionality of future OCIs as well as the radical changes in scholarly practices including new reading, learning, and information-seeking practices enabled by OCIs.

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