Cyberinfrastructure/E-Science

"Infra Finder: a New Tool to Enhance Transparency, Discoverability and Trust in Open Infrastructure"

This paper describes Infra Finder, a new tool built by Invest in Open Infrastructure to help institutional budget holders and libraries make more informed decisions around adoption of and investment in open infrastructure. Through increased transparency and discoverability, we aim for this tool to foster trust in the decision-making process and to help build connections between services, users, and funders. The design of Infra Finder is intended to contribute to ongoing discussions and developments regarding trust and transparency in open scholarly infrastructure, as well as help level the playing field between organizations with limited resources to conduct extensive due diligence processes and those with their own analyst teams. In this work, we describe the landscape analysis that led to the creation of Infra Finder, the use cases for the tool, and the approach IOI is taking to create and foster use of Infra Finder in the open infrastructure environment. We also address some of the principles of trust in open source and open infrastructure that have informed and impacted the Infra Finder project and our work in creating this tool.

https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v18i1.927

"The State of Open Infrastructure Funding: A Recap of IOI’s Community Conversation "

In July, IOI hosted its second State of Open Infrastructure Community Conversation — this time, exploring the state of open infrastructure grant funding.

To set the stage,, IOI’s senior researcher Gail Steinhart provided an overview of the methods that were used to gather over $415M USD in grant funding data for open infrastructures (OIs) and broke down some of the key findings from the analysis. To dive further into the topic of funding data, IOI Executive Director Kaitlin Thaney facilitated a panel conversation that featured Steinhart, collaborators Cameron Neylon and Karl Huang from the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), and John Mohr, CIO of Information Technology for theMacArthur Foundation and co-founder of the Philanthropy Data Commons. With their extensive experience in grant funding from diverse perspectives of the scholarly ecosystem, the panel shed light on the trends, impact, and limitations of grant funding for OIs. . . . .

Across the grants the team mapped for the 36 open infrastructures represented in this dataset, awards were categorized to reflect whether they provide direct support to an OI, indirect support (meaning the OI is referenced in the award title or abstract, but the funding does not directly support the OI though it may provide some indication of on OI’s broader impact), adoption support (funding that supports the implementation of an instance of an OI at a local or community scale), and grants we were unable to classify (unknown). While a significant amount (42%) of funding goes to direct support, the majority of the funding (52%) goes to indirect support.

https://tinyurl.com/ye2yfzsr

Video

Dataset

2024 State of Open Infrastructure Report

In this inaugural report, we dive deep into the characteristics of open infrastructure powering research and scholarship and what (we believe) sets them apart from their competitors. We take a closer look at the governing bodies and decision-makers behind the technologies your community relies on. We share the latest data and analysis of over US$415M in grant funding powering open infrastructures and research surrounding them, and bring you the latest infrastructure and policy developments in regions such as Latin America, Africa, and the European Union. We highlight success stories and the key trends in the adoption of open infrastructure. We share the latest on trends we’re tracking, such as the global movement towards Diamond Open Access and the underlying infrastructure needs, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the intersection with open research, and "digital sovereignty" and its impact on research across borders.

https://tinyurl.com/ycxs547k

"NSF Invests $90M in Innovative National Scientific Cyberinfrastructure for Transforming Stem Education"

The U.S. National Science Foundation announced today a strategic investment of $90 million over five years in SafeInsights, a unique national scientific cyberinfrastructure aimed at transforming learning research and STEM education. Funded through the Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure Level-2 program (Mid-scale RI-2), SafeInsights is led by OpenStax at Rice University, who will oversee the implementation and launch of this new research infrastructure project of unprecedented scale and scope.

SafeInsights aims to serve as a central hub, facilitating research coordination and leveraging data across a range of major digital learning platforms that currently serve tens of millions of U.S. learners across education levels and science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

With its controlled and intuitive framework, unique privacy-protecting approach and emphasis on the inclusion of students, educators and researchers from diverse backgrounds, SafeInsights will enable extensive, long-term research on the predictors of effective learning, which are key to academic success and persistence. . . .

Because progress in science, technology and innovation increasingly relies on advanced research infrastructure — including equipment, cyberinfrastructure, large-scale datasets and skilled personnel — this Mid-scale RI-2 investment will allow researchers to delve into deeper and broader scientific inquiries than ever before.

https://tinyurl.com/2pps983j

Award Abstract

"Platformisation of Science: Conceptual Foundations"

The digital platforms we are dealing with in this article are auxiliary tools that do not produce anything themselves but provide an infrastructure for service providers and users to meet. They have potentially unlimited scaling potential and have become the central places of exchange. In academia, we can also observe that research and its communication become more digital and that digital services are aiming to become platforms. In this article we explore the concept of digital platforms and their potential impact on academic research, firstly addressing the question: To what extent can digital platforms be understood as a specific type of research infrastructure? We draw from recent literature on platforms and platformisation from different streams of scholarship and relate them to the science studies concept of research infrastructures, to eventually arrive at a framework for science platforms. Secondly, we aim to assess how science platforms may affect scholarly practice. Thirdly, we aim to assess to what extent science is platformised and how this interferes with scientific understandings of quality and autonomy. At the end of this article, we argue that the potential benefits of platform infrastructure for academic pursuits cannot be ignored, but the commercialization of the infrastructure for scholarly communication is a cause for concern. Ultimately, a nuanced and well-informed perspective on the impact of platformisation on academia is necessary to ensure that the academic community can maximize the benefits of digital infrastructures while mitigating negative consequences.

http://dx.doi.org/10.53377/lq.16693

Ithaka S+R: The Second Digital Transformation of Scholarly Publishing

Today, the scholarly publishing sector is undergoing its second digital transformation. The first digital transformation saw a massive shift from paper to digital, but otherwise publishing retained many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era. A variety of shared infrastructure was developed to serve the needs of this first digital transformation. In this current second digital transformation, many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era are being revamped in favor of new approaches that bring tremendous opportunities, and also non-trivial risks, to scholarly communication. The second digital transformation requires shared infrastructure that is fit for purpose. It is our objective with this paper to examine the needs for shared infrastructure that will support this second digital transformation.

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.320210

Ithaka S+R Draft for Comment: The Second Digital Transformation of Scholarly Publishing: Strategic Context and Shared Infrastructure

The issue that we identified as the biggest gap today is the perceived need for a secure digital identity for legitimate scholars, to help editors triage submissions into more and less trusted categories. We see opportunities for researcher identifiers to be used as the hub for much greater information about digital identity, in part by allowing publishers and other parties to submit markers of identity into identifier records. As examples, publishers that have processed APC transactions using credit cards have substantial signs of verified identity, as do universities that have securely linked an email address.

The boundaries of the scholarly record represent another aspect of research integrity that requires new forms of infrastructure. Of course the record has never had absolute boundaries. But in a subscription landscape, libraries played an important role in establishing the metes and bounds of the scholarly record (and what would be preserved over time) based on their selection decision-making. In a gold or diamond open access environment, libraries may have a reduced role and so other forms of boundary-setting may be required. Journal rankings may increasingly serve to set the boundaries of the scholarly record, although whether that is the right form of shared infrastructure, or whether it has the right governance and business model to allow it to serve this role without fear or favor, is not yet settled.

https://tinyurl.com/mr2ce748

Defining Open Scholarly Infrastructure: A Review of Relevant Literature

This report outlines IOI’s initial attempt towards a framework for understanding open infrastructure for research and scholarship. For this report, we examined a body of literature that includes works across the fields of anthropology, scholarly communications, international development studies, science and technology studies, and infrastructure studies.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7064538

"Ten Lessons for Data Sharing with a Data Commons"

A data commons is a cloud-based data platform with a governance structure that allows a community to manage, analyze and share its data. Data commons provide a research community with the ability to manage and analyze large datasets using the elastic scalability provided by cloud computing and to share data securely and compliantly, and, in this way, accelerate the pace of research. Over the past decade, a number of data commons have been developed and we discuss some of the lessons learned from this effort.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02029-x

"Scaling Identifiers and Their Metadata to Gigascale: An Architecture to Tackle the Challenges of Volume and Variety"

Persistent identifiers are applied to an ever-increasing variety of research objects, including software, samples, models, people, instruments, grants, and projects, and there is a growing need to apply identifiers at a finer and finer granularity. Unfortunately, the systems developed over two decades ago to manage identifiers and the metadata describing the identified objects no longer scale. Communities working with physical samples have grappled with these three challenges of the increasing volume, variety, and variability of identified objects for many years. To address this dual challenge, the IGSN 2040 project explored how metadata and catalogues for physical samples could be shared at the scale of billions of samples across an ever-growing variety of users and disciplines. In this paper, we focus on how we scale identifiers and their describing metadata to billions of objects and who the actors involved with this system are. Our analysis of these requirements resulted in the definition of a minimum viable product and the design of an architecture that not only addresses the challenges of increasing volume and variety but, more importantly, is easy to implement because it reuses commonly used Web components. Our solution is based on a Web architectural model that utilises Schema.org, JSON-LD, and sitemaps. Applying these commonly used architectural patterns on the internet allows us to not only handle increasing variety but also enable better compliance with the FAIR Guiding Principles.

http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2023-005

Paywall: "A Comprehensive Review of Open Data Platforms, Prevalent Technologies, and Functionalities"

We will discuss seven major open data platforms, such as (1) CKAN (2) DKAN (3) Socrata (4) OpenDataSoft (5) GitHub (6) Google datasets (7) Kaggle. We will evaluate the technological commons, techniques, features, methods, and visualization offered by each tool. In addition, why are these platforms important to users such as providers, curators, and end-users? And what are the key options available on these platforms to publish open data?

https://doi.org/10.1145/3560107.3560142

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"OpenStack Swift: An Ideal Bit-Level Object Storage System for Digital Preservation "

A bit-level object storage system is a foundational building block of long-term digital preservation (LTDP). To achieve the purposes of LTDP, the system must be able to: preserve the authenticity and integrity of the original digital objects; scale up with dramatically increasing demands for preservation storage; mitigate the impact of hardware obsolescence and software ephemerality; replicate digital objects among distributed data centers at different geographical locations; and to constantly audit and automatically recover from compromised states. . . . In this paper, we present OpenStack Swift, an open-source, mature and widely accepted cloud platform, as a practical and proven solution with a case study at the University of Alberta Library. We emphasize the implementation, application, cost analysis and maintenance of the system, with the purpose of contributing to the community with an exceedingly robust, highly scalable, self-healing and comparatively cost-effective bit-level object storage system for long-term digital preservation.

https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v17i1.782

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"The Emerging Digital Infrastructure for Research in the Humanities"

This article advances the thesis that three decades of investments by national and international funders, combined with those of scholars, technologists, librarians, archivists, and their institutions, have resulted in a digital infrastructure in the humanities that is now capable of supporting end-to-end research workflows. . . . The capabilities of the infrastructure remain unevenly distributed within and across disciplines, institutions, and regions. Moreover, the components, including the links between steps in the workflow, are generally far from user-friendly and seamless in operation. Because further refinements and additional capacities are still much needed, the article concludes with a discussion of key priorities for future work.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-022-00332-3

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"Revisiting: Humanities Research Infrastructure is Great ROI"

https://cutt.ly/cXD0oi5

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Paywall – US Is Falling Behind: "Playing Catch-up in Building an Open Research Commons"

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.abo5947

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Paywall: "Data Sharing Platforms: Instruments to Inform and Shape Science Policy on Data Sharing?"

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04361-2

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NSF Announces Research Data Ecosystem: A National Resource for Reproducible, Robust, and Transparent Social Science Research in the 21st Century

https://cutt.ly/AOV6H2T

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"Big Data Infrastructure at the Crossroads: Support Needs and Challenges for Universities"

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.316121

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"CADRE: A Collaborative, Cloud-Based Solution for Big Bibliographic Data Research in Academic Libraries"

https://doi.org/10.3389/fdata.2020.556282

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"Research Computing in the Cloud: Leveling the Playing Field"

Michael Berman has published "Research Computing in the Cloud: Leveling the Playing Field" in EDUCAUSE Review.

Here's an excerpt:

The universal availability of commodity cloud services and high-speed networks can eliminate the requirement that departments must have local HPC resources. The infrastructure available from large cloud providers such as AWS dwarfs and outperforms all but the largest and most-specialized supercomputing facilities. . . .

Moving large data sets on commodity networks, or even on regional research and education networks, simply doesn't work well for hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data, which is the scale required by modern researchers in many fields. . . .

To begin to address these issues, the Pacific Research Platform (PRP), a collaboration among research universities and CENIC (operator of the CalREN network serving California), has been funded by the National Science Foundation to support the streaming of "elephant flows."

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 9 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

Implementation Roadmap for the European Open Science Cloud

The European Commission has released Implementation Roadmap for the European Open Science Cloud.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Overall, the document presents the results and available evidence from an extensive and conclusive consultation process that started with the publication of the Communication: European Cloud initiative (COM(2016)178) in April 2016.

The consultation upheld the intervention logic presented in the Communication, to create a fit for purpose pan-European federation of research data infrastructures, with a view to moving from the current fragmentation to a situation where data is easy to store, find, share and re-use.

On the basis of the consultation, the implementation Roadmap gives and overview of six actions lines for the implementation of the EOSC:

a) architecture, b) data, c) services, d) access & interfaces, e) rules and f) governance.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 8 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"The Modern Research Data Portal: A Design Pattern for Networked, Data-Intensive Science"

Kyle Chard et al. have published "The Modern Research Data Portal: A Design Pattern for Networked, Data-Intensive Science" in PeerJ.

Here's an excerpt:

In this article, we first define the problems that research data portals address, introduce the legacy approach, and examine its limitations. We then introduce the MRDP design pattern and describe its realization via the integration of two elements: Science DMZs (Dart et al., 2013) (high-performance network enclaves that connect large-scale data servers directly to high-speed networks) and cloud-based data management and authentication services such as those provided by Globus (Chard, Tuecke & Foster, 2014). We then outline a reference implementation of the MRDP design pattern, also provided in its entirety on the companion web site, https://docs.globus.org/mrdp, that the reader can study—and, if they so desire, deploy and adapt to build their own high-performance research data portal. We also review various deployments to show how the MRDP approach has been applied in practice: examples like the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Research Data Archive, which provides for high-speed data delivery to thousands of geoscientists; the Sanger Imputation Service, which provides for online analysis of user-provided genomic data; the Globus data publication service, which provides for interactive data publication and discovery; and the DMagic data sharing system for data distribution from light sources. We conclude with a discussion of related technologies and summary.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 8 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

Digital Humanities: "CSDH/SCHN Cyberinfrastructure Conversations Summary"

CSDH/SCHN has released the "CSDH/SCHN Cyberinfrastructure Conversations Summary."

Here's an excerpt:

This is a high-level summary of the outcome of a series of conversations regarding the CFI Cyberinfrastructure Initiative among Canadian Digital Humanists. The conversations emerged from CSDH/SCHN consultations that began in the Spring of 2014. The document tries to reflect the priorities and areas of emphasis that have emerged from these discussions, and suggests several areas of focus for broad-based collaborative cyberinfrastructure that would serve the needs of many in the digital humanities research community. The diversity of work in the digital humanities makes it impossible to mention every need, but in the view of the CSDH executive, this summary covers a number of pressing needs from a range of research groups across the country, and balances the need to serve existing researchers with that of expanding access to important datasets and cyberinfrastructure to leading humanities researchers who are experimenting with advanced research computing.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"E-Science as a Catalyst for Transformational Change in University Research Libraries"

Mary E. Piorun has self-archived her dissertaion "E-Science as a Catalyst for Transformational Change in University Research Libraries."

Here's an excerpt:

Changes in how research is conducted, from the growth of e-science to the emergence of big data, have lead to new opportunities for librarians to become involved in the creation and management of research data, at the same time the duties and responsibilities of university libraries continue to evolve. This study examines those roles related to e-science while exploring the concept of transformational change and leadership issues in bringing about such a change. Using the framework established by Levy and Merry for first- and second-order change, four case studies of libraries whose institutions are members in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) are developed.

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"The Role of the Library in the Research Enterprise"

Christopher J. Shaffer has published "The Role of the Library in the Research Enterprise" in the latest issue of the Journal of eScience Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

Libraries have provided services to researchers for many years. Changes in technology and new publishing models provide opportunities for libraries to be more involved in the research enterprise. Within this article, the author reviews traditional library services, briefly describes the eScience and publishing landscape as it relates to libraries, and explores possible library programs in support of research. Many of the new opportunities require new partnerships, both within the institution and externally.

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