Category: Data Curation, Open Data, and Research Data Management

"Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier"

Christine L. Borgman has self-archived "Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier."

Here's an excerpt:

As universities recognize the inherent value in the data they collect and hold, they encounter unforeseen challenges in stewarding those data in ways that balance accountability, transparency, and protection of privacy, academic freedom, and intellectual property. Two parallel developments in academic data collection are converging: (1) open access requirements, whereby researchers must provide access to their data as a condition of obtaining grant funding or publishing results in journals; and (2) the vast accumulation of 'grey data' about individuals in their daily activities of research, teaching, learning, services, and administration. The boundaries between research and grey data are blurring, making it more difficult to assess the risks and responsibilities associated with any data collection. Many sets of data, both research and grey, fall outside privacy regulations such as HIPAA, FERPA, and PII. Universities are exploiting these data for research, learning analytics, faculty evaluation, strategic decisions, and other sensitive matters. Commercial entities are besieging universities with requests for access to data or for partnerships to mine them. The privacy frontier facing research universities spans open access practices, uses and misuses of data, public records requests, cyber risk, and curating data for privacy protection. This paper explores the competing values inherent in data stewardship and makes recommendations for practice, drawing on the pioneering work of the University of California in privacy and information security, data governance, and cyber risk.

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"Using ORCID, DOI, and Other Open Identifiers in Research Evaluation"

Laurel L. Haak et al. have published "Using ORCID, DOI, and Other Open Identifiers in Research Evaluation" in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics.

Here's an excerpt:

We describe how identifiers, such as ORCID iDs and DOIs, are being embedded in research workflows across science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics; how this is affecting data availability for evaluation purposes: and provide examples of evaluations that are leveraging identifiers. We also discuss the importance of provenance and preservation in establishing confidence in the reliability and trustworthiness of data and relationships, and in the long-term availability of metadata describing objects and their inter-relationships.

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"Surveying the State of Data Curation: a Review of Policy and Practice in UK HEIs"

Amy Pham has self-archived "Surveying the State of Data Curation: a Review of Policy and Practice in UK HEIs."

Here's an excerpt:

Through a three-part methodology, the dissertation research aimed to provide a clear picture of the current state of data curation in UK HEIs, including adherence to best practices and the existence of provisions for data curation efforts. A survey questionnaire was disseminated as the primary method of data collection, and additional information was gathered through a literature review and an analysis of online resources and institutional policies. Data curation practices were found to be mostly inconsistent with best practices and were largely focused on facilitating access to research data. However, there is an awareness of the underdeveloped areas of data curation, especially preservation, and efforts are being made to improve these areas. Institutional policies were found to be mostly documents that defined roles and responsibilities and provided little guidance for follow-through. The role of researchers was repeatedly emphasized in both policy and practice and was essential in understanding the current state of data curation.

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"Facilitating and Improving Environmental Research Data Repository Interoperability"

Corinna Gries et al. have published "Facilitating and Improving Environmental Research Data Repository Interoperability" in Data Science Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Environmental research data repositories provide much needed services for data preservation and data dissemination to diverse communities with domain specific or programmatic data needs and standards. Due to independent development these repositories serve their communities well, but were developed with different technologies, data models and using different ontologies. Hence, the effectiveness and efficiency of these services can be vastly improved if repositories work together adhering to a shared community platform that focuses on the implementation of agreed upon standards and best practices for curation and dissemination of data. Such a community platform drives forward the convergence of technologies and practices that will advance cross-domain interoperability. It will also facilitate contributions from investigators through standardized and streamlined workflows and provide increased visibility for the role of data managers and the curation services provided by data repositories, beyond preservation infrastructure. Ten specific suggestions for such standardizations are outlined without any suggestions for priority or technical implementation. Although the recommendations are for repositories to implement, they have been chosen specifically with the data provider/data curator and synthesis scientist in mind.

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"Towards a Culture of Open Science and Data Sharing in Health and Medical Research"

Anisa Rowhani-Farid has self-archived "Towards a Culture of Open Science and Data Sharing in Health and Medical Research."

Here's an excerpt:

This [Ph.D] thesis investigated the factors that contribute to the cultural shift towards open science and data sharing in health and medical research, with a focus on the role health and medical journals play. The findings of this research demonstrate that journal data sharing policies are not effective and that journals do not currently provide incentives for sharing. This study contributed to the movement towards more reproducible research by providing empirical evidence for the strengthening of journal data sharing policies and the adoption of an incentive for open research.

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Science as an Open Enterprise

The Royal Society has released Science as an Open Enterprise.

Here's an excerpt:

This report analyses the impact of new and emerging technologies that are transforming the conduct and communication of research. The recommendations are designed to improve the conduct of science, respond to changing public expectations and political culture and enable researchers to maximise the impact of their research. They are designed to ensure that reproducibility and self-correction are maintained in an era of massive data volumes. They aim to stimulate the communication and collaboration where these are needed to maximise the value of data-intensive approaches to science.

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"Ensuring the Long-Term Accessibility of Creative Content"

Wendi Maloney has published "Ensuring the Long-Term Accessibility of Creative Content" in the Library of Congress Blog.

Here's an excerpt:

Since the first edition of the Recommended Formats Statement came out in 2014, the Library of Congress has been committed to making it as useful as possible to a wide and varied audience. The statement identifies formats, or sets of technical characteristics – such as physical books, digital file types, specific editions or specific metadata elements—that encourage preservation and long-term access for creative works. Recently, the Library released an updated 2018–19 edition of the statement. . . .

To make the statement useful, it has to reflect reality. For example, the 2018-19 edition of the statement emphasizes the benefit of electronic delivery of datasets. Datasets are a rapidly expanding content area that bring unique challenges for large-scale file delivery and repository management. The datasets section of the statement now includes a preference for access by public or private online URLs over tangible media such as CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. This more accurately reflects the reality of acquiring and managing digital content in modern workflows.

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"Populating the Data Ark: An Attempt to Retrieve, Preserve, and Liberate Data from the Most Highly-Cited Psychology and Psychiatry Articles"

Tom E. Hardwicke and John P. A. Ioannidis have published "Populating the Data Ark: An Attempt to Retrieve, Preserve, and Liberate Data from the Most Highly-Cited Psychology and Psychiatry Articles" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

The vast majority of scientific articles published to-date have not been accompanied by concomitant publication of the underlying research data upon which they are based. This state of affairs precludes the routine re-use and re-analysis of research data, undermining the efficiency of the scientific enterprise, and compromising the credibility of claims that cannot be independently verified. It may be especially important to make data available for the most influential studies that have provided a foundation for subsequent research and theory development. Therefore, we launched an initiative—the Data Ark—to examine whether we could retrospectively enhance the preservation and accessibility of important scientific data. Here we report the outcome of our efforts to retrieve, preserve, and liberate data from 111 of the most highly-cited articles published in psychology and psychiatry between 2006–2011 (n = 48) and 2014–2016 (n = 63). Most data sets were not made available (76/111, 68%, 95% CI [60, 77]), some were only made available with restrictions (20/111, 18%, 95% CI [10, 27]), and few were made available in a completely unrestricted form (15/111, 14%, 95% CI [5, 22]). Where extant data sharing systems were in place, they usually (17/22, 77%, 95% CI [54, 91]) did not allow unrestricted access. Authors reported several barriers to data sharing, including issues related to data ownership and ethical concerns. The Data Ark initiative could help preserve and liberate important scientific data, surface barriers to data sharing, and advance community discussions on data stewardship.

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"Open Science Support as a Portfolio of Services and Projects: From Awareness to Engagement"

Birgit Schmidt et al. have published "Open Science Support as a Portfolio of Services and Projects: From Awareness to Engagement" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

Together with many other universities worldwide, the University of Gõttingen has aimed to unlock the full potential of networked digital scientific communication by strengthening open access as early as the late 1990s. Open science policies at the institutional level consequently followed and have been with us for over a decade. However, for several reasons, their adoption often is still far from complete when it comes to the practices of researchers or research groups. To improve this situation at our university, there is dedicated support at the infrastructural level: the university library collaborates with several campus units in developing and running services, activities and projects in support of open access and open science. This article outlines our main activity areas and aligns them with the overall rationale to reach higher uptake and acceptance of open science practice at the university. The mentioned examples of our activities highlight how we seek to advance open science along the needs and perspectives of diverse audiences and by running it as a multi-stakeholder endeavor. Therefore, our activities involve library colleagues with diverse backgrounds, faculty and early career researchers, research managers, as well as project and infrastructure staff. We conclude with a summary of achievements and challenges to be faced.

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"How Are We Measuring Up? Evaluating Research Data Services in Academic Libraries"

Heather L. Coates et al. have published "How Are We Measuring Up? Evaluating Research Data Services in Academic Libraries" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION In the years since the emergence of federal funding agency data management and sharing requirements (http://datasharing.sparcopen.org/data), research data services (RDS) have expanded to dozens of academic libraries in the United States. As these services have matured, service providers have begun to assess them. Given a lack of practical guidance in the literature, we seek to begin the discussion with several case studies and an exploration of four approaches suitable to assessing these emerging services. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM This article examines five case studies that vary by staffing, drivers, and institutional context in order to begin a practice-oriented conversation about how to evaluate and assess research data services in academic libraries. The case studies highlight some commonly discussed challenges, including insufficient training and resources, competing demands for evaluation efforts, and the tension between evidence that can be easily gathered and that which addresses our most important questions. We explore reflective practice, formative evaluation, developmental evaluation, and evidence-based library and information practice for ideas to advance practice. NEXT STEPS Data specialists engaged in providing research data services need strategies and tools with which to make decisions about their services. These range from identifying stakeholder needs to refining existing services to determining when to extend and discontinue declining services. While the landscape of research data services is broad and diverse, there are common needs that we can address as a community. To that end, we have created a community-owned space to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and existing resources.

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"A Newbie at the RDAP Summit, or How I Learned that the RDAP Summit is for Everyone"

Joanna Thule has published "A Newbie at the RDAP Summit, or How I Learned that the RDAP Summit is for Everyone " in the Journal of Science Librarian ship.

Here's an excerpt:

After describing the format of the Summit, the highlights of attending are described, including gathering ideas related to all aspects of research data management, access, and preservation; hearing data management perspectives from outside of academic libraries; networking opportunities for the extrovert and introvert; and opportunities to connect with librarians at similar universities and with similar interests.

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"Data Management and Sharing in Neuroimaging: Practices and Perceptions of MRI Researchers"

John A. Borghi and Ana E. Van Gulick have published "Data Management and Sharing in Neuroimaging: Practices and Perceptions of MRI Researchers" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

Neuroimaging methods such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) involve complex data collection and analysis protocols, which necessitate the establishment of good research data management (RDM). Despite efforts within the field to address issues related to rigor and reproducibility, information about the RDM-related practices and perceptions of neuroimaging researchers remains largely anecdotal. To inform such efforts, we conducted an online survey of active MRI researchers that covered a range of RDM-related topics. Survey questions addressed the type(s) of data collected, tools used for data storage, organization, and analysis, and the degree to which practices are defined and standardized within a research group. Our results demonstrate that neuroimaging data is acquired in multifarious forms, transformed and analyzed using a wide variety of software tools, and that RDM practices and perceptions vary considerably both within and between research groups, with trainees reporting less consistency than faculty. Ratings of the maturity of RDM practices from ad-hoc to refined were relatively high during the data collection and analysis phases of a project and significantly lower during the data sharing phase. Perceptions of emerging practices including open access publishing and preregistration were largely positive, but demonstrated little adoption into current practice.

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"Health Sciences Libraries Advancing Collaborative Clinical Research Data Management in Universities"

Tania P. Bardyn et al. have published "Health Sciences Libraries Advancing Collaborative Clinical Research Data Management in Universities" in the Journal of eScience Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

Purpose: Medical libraries need to actively review their service models and explore partnerships with other campus entities to provide better-coordinated clinical research management services to faculty and researchers. TRAIL (Translational Research and Information Lab), a five-partner initiative at the University of Washington (UW), explores how best to leverage existing expertise and space to deliver clinical research data management (CRDM) services and emerging technology support to clinical researchers at UW and collaborating institutions in the Pacific Northwest.

Methods: The initiative offers 14 services and a technology-enhanced innovation lab located in the Health Sciences Library (HSL) to support the University of Washington clinical and research enterprise. Sharing of staff and resources merges library and non-library workflows, better coordinating data and innovation services to clinical researchers. Librarians have adopted new roles in CRDM, such as providing user support and training for UW's Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) instance.

Results: TRAIL staff are quickly adapting to changing workflows and shared services, including teaching classes on tools used to manage clinical research data. Researcher interest in TRAIL has sparked new collaborative initiatives and service offerings. Marketing and promotion will be important for raising researchers’ awareness of available services.

Conclusions: Medical librarians are developing new skills by supporting and teaching CRDM. Clinical and data librarians better understand the information needs of clinical and translational researchers by being involved in the earlier stages of the research cycle and identifying technologies that can improve healthcare outcomes. At health sciences libraries, leveraging existing resources and bringing services together is central to how university medical librarians will operate in the future.

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"Supporting the Proliferation of Data-Sharing Scholars in the Research Ecosystem"

Ali Krzton has published "Supporting the Proliferation of Data-Sharing Scholars in the Research Ecosystem" in the Journal of eScience Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

Librarians champion the value of openness in scholarship and have been powerful advocates for the sharing of research data. College and university administrators have recently joined in the push for data sharing due to funding mandates. However, the researchers who create and control the data usually determine whether and how data is shared, so it is worthwhile to look at what they are incentivized to do. The current scholarly publishing landscape plus the promotion and tenure process create a "prisoner’s dilemma" for researchers as they decide whether or not to share data, consistent with the observation that researchers in general are eager for others to share data but reluctant to do so themselves. If librarians encourage researchers to share data and promote openness without simultaneously addressing the academic incentive structure, those who are intrinsically motivated to share data will be selected against via the promotion and tenure process. This will cause those who are hostile to sharing to be disproportionately recruited into the senior ranks of academia. To mitigate the risk of this unintended consequence, librarians must advocate for a change in incentives alongside the call for greater openness. Highly-cited datasets must be given similar weight to highly-cited articles in promotion and tenure decisions in order for researchers to reap the rewards of their sharing. Librarians can help by facilitating data citation to track the impact of datasets and working to persuade higher administration of the value of rewarding data sharing in tenure and promotion.

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Want to Support Open Access? Volunteer for the Open Access Tracking Project

The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) provides a constant stream of up-to-date information about open access issues in a primary feed and in a number of secondary feeds that focus on specialized OA subtopics. It offers the primary feed in a variety of distribution options, including email, Google+, HTML, RSS, Twitter, and others. It is an invaluable source of information for open access advocates, research data specialists, and scholarly communication specialists, and it provides important support for the open access movement as a whole.

Based at the Harvard Open Access Project, the OATP was launched by Peter Suber. Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter and his Free Online Scholarship Newsletter played an important part in getting the open access movement off the ground. The OATP continues the mission of those groundbreaking publications using the open source TagTeam software, which was developed for the OATP.

Launched with the help of grant funding, the OATP will enter a new an all-volunteer phase at the end of August 2018. To continue this crowd-sourced project, new volunteers are needed. You can help move the OA agenda forward by being one of them. This wiki page explains how you can join the team and start tagging.

By volunteering just a bit of time to the OATP, you can make a significant difference.

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"A Funder-Imposed Data Publication Requirement Seldom Inspired Data Sharing"

Jessica L. Couture et al. have published "A Funder-Imposed Data Publication Requirement Seldom Inspired Data Sharing" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

Growth of the open science movement has drawn significant attention to data sharing and availability across the scientific community. In this study, we tested the ability to recover data collected under a particular funder-imposed requirement of public availability. We assessed overall data recovery success, tested whether characteristics of the data or data creator were indicators of recovery success, and identified hurdles to data recovery. Overall the majority of data were not recovered (26% recovery of 315 data projects), a similar result to journal-driven efforts to recover data. Field of research was the most important indicator of recovery success, but neither home agency sector nor age of data were determinants of recovery. While we did not find a relationship between recovery of data and age of data, age did predict whether we could find contact information for the grantee. The main hurdles to data recovery included those associated with communication with the researcher; loss of contact with the data creator accounted for half (50%) of unrecoverable datasets, and unavailability of contact information accounted for 35% of unrecoverable datasets. Overall, our results suggest that funding agencies and journals face similar challenges to enforcement of data requirements. We advocate that funding agencies could improve the availability of the data they fund by dedicating more resources to enforcing compliance with data requirements, providing data-sharing tools and technical support to awardees, and administering stricter consequences for those who ignore data sharing preconditions./p>

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