"Library Carpentry: Software Skills Training for Library Professionals"

Jez Cope and James Baker have published "Library Carpentry: Software Skills Training for Library Professionals" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

Much time and energy is now being devoted to developing the skills of researchers in the related areas of data analysis and data management. However, less attention is currently paid to developing the data skills of librarians themselves: these skills are often brought in by recruitment in niche areas rather than considered as a wider development need for the library workforce, and are not widely recognised as important to the professional career development of librarians. We believe that building computational and data science capacity within academic libraries will have direct benefits for both librarians and the users we serve.

Library Carpentry is a global effort to provide training to librarians in technical areas that have traditionally been seen as the preserve of researchers, IT support and systems librarians. Established non-profit volunteer organisations, such as Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry, offer introductory research software skills training with a focus on the needs and requirements of research scientists. Library Carpentry is a comparable introductory software skills training programme with a focus on the needs and requirements of library and information professionals. This paper describes how the material was developed and delivered, and reports on challenges faced, lessons learned and future plans.

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"Implementing a Research Data Policy at Leiden University "

Fieke Schoots et al. have published "Implementing a Research Data Policy at Leiden University " in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper, we discuss the various stages of the institution-wide project that lead to the adoption of the data management policy at Leiden University in 2016. We illustrate this process by highlighting how we have involved all stakeholders. Each organisational unit was represented in the project teams. Results were discussed in a sounding board with both academic and support staff. Senior researchers acted as pioneers and raised awareness and commitment among their peers. By way of example, we present pilot projects from two faculties. We then describe the comprehensive implementation programme that will create facilities and services that must allow implementing the policy as well as monitoring and evaluating it. Finally, we will present lessons learnt and steps ahead. The engagement of all stakeholders, as well as explicit commitment from the Executive Board, has been an important key factor for the success of the project and will continue to be an important condition for the steps ahead.

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"How Valid is your Validation? A Closer Look Behind the Curtain of JHOVE "

Michelle Lindlar and Yvonne Tunnat have published "How Valid is your Validation? A Closer Look Behind the Curtain of JHOVE " in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

Validation is a key task of any preservation workflow and often JHOVE is the first tool of choice for characterizing and validating common file formats. Due to the tool’s maturity and high adoption, decisions if a file is indeed fit for long-term availability are often made based on JHOVE output. But can we trust a tool simply based on its wide adoption and maturity by age? How does JHOVE determine the validity and well-formedness of a file? Does a module really support all versions of a file format family? How much of the file formats’ standards do we need to know and understand in order to interpret the output correctly? Are there options to verify JHOVE-based decisions within preservation workflows? While the software has been a long-standing favourite within the digital curation domain for many years, a recent look at JHOVE as a vital decision supporting tool is currently missing. This paper presents a practice report which aims to close this gap.

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"Support Your Data: A Research Data Management Guide for Researchers"

John A Borghi et al. have published "Support Your Data: A Research Data Management Guide for Researchers" in Research Ideas and Outcomes.

Here's an excerpt:

Researchers are faced with rapidly evolving expectations about how they should manage and share their data, code, and other research materials. To help them meet these expectations and generally manage and share their data more effectively, we are developing a suite of tools which we are currently referring to as "Support Your Data". These tools, which include a rubric designed to enable researchers to self-assess their current data management practices and a series of short guides which provide actionable information about how to advance practices as necessary or desired, are intended to be easily customizable to meet the needs of a researchers working in a variety of institutional and disciplinary contexts.

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"Data Sharing in PLOS ONE: An Analysis of Data Availability Statements"

Lisa M. Federer et al. have published "Data Sharing in PLOS ONE: An Analysis of Data Availability Statements" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

A number of publishers and funders, including PLOS, have recently adopted policies requiring researchers to share the data underlying their results and publications. Such policies help increase the reproducibility of the published literature, as well as make a larger body of data available for reuse and re-analysis. In this study, we evaluate the extent to which authors have complied with this policy by analyzing Data Availability Statements from 47,593 papers published in PLOS ONE between March 2014 (when the policy went into effect) and May 2016. Our analysis shows that compliance with the policy has increased, with a significant decline over time in papers that did not include a Data Availability Statement. However, only about 20% of statements indicate that data are deposited in a repository, which the PLOS policy states is the preferred method. More commonly, authors state that their data are in the paper itself or in the supplemental information, though it is unclear whether these data meet the level of sharing required in the PLOS policy. These findings suggest that additional review of Data Availability Statements or more stringent policies may be needed to increase data sharing.

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"Operationalizing the Replication Standard: A Case Study of the Data Curation and Verification Workflow for Scholarly Journals"

Thu-Mai Christian et al. have self-archived "Operationalizing the Replication Standard: A Case Study of the Data Curation and Verification Workflow for Scholarly Journals."

Here's an excerpt:

In response to widespread concerns about the integrity of research published in scholarly journals, several initiatives have emerged that are promoting research transparency through access to data underlying published scientific findings. Journal editors, in particular, have made a commitment to research transparency by issuing data policies that require authors to submit their data, code, and documentation to data repositories to allow for public access to the data. In the case of the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) Data Replication Policy, the data also must undergo an independent verification process in which materials are reviewed for quality as a condition of final manuscript publication and acceptance. Aware of the specialized expertise of the data archives, AJPS called upon the Odum Institute Data Archive to provide a data review service that performs data curation and verification of replication datasets. This article presents a case study of the collaboration between AJPS and the Odum Institute Data Archive to develop a workflow that bridges manuscript publication and data review processes. The case study describes the challenges and the successes of the workflow integration, and offers lessons learned that may be applied by other data archives that are considering expanding their services to include data curation and verification services to support reproducible research.

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"Curating Humanities Research Data: Managing Workflows for Adjusting a Repository Framework "

Hagen Peukert has published "Curating Humanities Research Data: Managing Workflows for Adjusting a Repository Framework" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

Handling heterogeneous data, subject to minimal costs, can be perceived as a classic management problem. The approach at hand applies established managerial theorizing to the field of data curation. It is argued, however, that data curation cannot merely be treated as a standard case of applying management theory in a traditional sense. Rather, the practice of curating humanities research data, the specifications and adjustments of the model suggested here reveal an intertwined process, in which knowledge of both strategic management and solid information technology have to be considered. Thus, suggestions on the strategic positioning of research data, which can be used as an analytical tool to understand the proposed workflow mechanisms, and the definition of workflow modules, which can be flexibly used in designing new standard workflows to configure research data repositories, are put forward.

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"How Important is Data Curation? Gaps and Opportunities for Academic Libraries"

Lisa R Johnston et al. have published "How Important is Data Curation? Gaps and Opportunities for Academic Libraries" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION Data curation may be an emerging service for academic libraries, but researchers actively "curate" their data in a number of ways—even if terminology may not always align. Building on past userneeds assessments performed via survey and focus groups, the authors sought direct input from researchers on the importance and utilization of specific data curation activities. METHODS Between October 21, 2016, and November 18, 2016, the study team held focus groups with 91 participants at six different academic institutions to determine which data curation activities were most important to researchers, which activities were currently underway for their data, and how satisfied they were with the results. RESULTS Researchers are actively engaged in a variety of data curation activities, and while they considered most data curation activities to be highly important, a majority of the sample reported dissatisfaction with the current state of data curation at their institution. DISCUSSION Our findings demonstrate specific gaps and opportunities for academic libraries to focus their data curation services to more effectively meet researcher needs. CONCLUSION Research libraries stand to benefit their users by emphasizing, investing in, and/or heavily promoting the highly valued services that may not currently be in use by many researchers.

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2017 Fixity Survey Report: An NDSA Report

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance has released the 2017 Fixity Survey Report: An NDSA Report.

Here's an excerpt:

Fixity checking, or the practice of algorithmically reviewing digital content to insure that it has not changed over time, is a complex but essential aspect in digital preservation management. To date, there have been no broadly established best practices surrounding fixity checking, perhaps largely due to the wide variety of digital preservation systems and solutions employed by cultural heritage organizations. In an attempt to understand the common practices that exist for fixity checking, as well as the challenges institutions face when implementing a fixity check routine, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Fixity Working Group developed and published a survey on fixity practices in fall of 2017. A total of 164 survey responses were recorded, of which 89 completed surveys were used in results analysis.

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"ARCHANGEL: Trusted Archives of Digital Public Documents"

John Collomosse, have self-archived "ARCHANGEL: Trusted Archives of Digital Public Documents."

Here's an excerpt:

We present ARCHANGEL; a de-centralised platform for ensuring the long-term integrity of digital documents stored within public archives. Document integrity is fundamental to public trust in archives. Yet currently that trust is built upon institutional reputation—trust at face value in a centralised authority, like a national government archive or University. ARCHANGEL proposes a shift to a technological underscoring of that trust, using distributed ledger technology (DLT) to cryptographically guarantee the provenance, immutability and so the integrity of archived documents. We describe the ARCHANGEL architecture, and report on a prototype of that architecture build over the Ethereum infrastructure. We report early evaluation and feedback of ARCHANGEL from stakeholders in the research data archives space.

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"Integration of an Active Research Data System with a Data Repository to Streamline the Research Data Lifecyle: Pure-NOMAD Case Study"

Simone Ivan Conte et al. have published "Integration of an Active Research Data System with a Data Repository to Streamline the Research Data Lifecyle: Pure-NOMAD Case Study " in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

Research funders have introduced requirements that expect researchers to properly manage and publicly share their research data, and expect institutions to put in place services to support researchers in meeting these requirements. So far the general focus of these services and systems has been on addressing the final stages of the research data lifecycle (archive, share and re-use), rather than stages related to the active phase of the cycle (collect/create and analyse). As a result, full integration of active data management systems with data repositories is not yet the norm, making the streamlined transition of data from an active to a published and archived status an important challenge. In this paper we present the integration between an active data management system developed in-house (NOMAD) and Elsevier's Pure data repository used at our institution, with the aim of offering a simple workflow to facilitate and promote the data deposit process. The integration results in a new data management and publication workflow that helps researchers to save time, minimize human errors related to manually handling files, and further promote data deposit together with collaboration across the institution.

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"Are the FAIR Data Principles Fair?"

Alastair Dunning, Madeleine de Smaele, and Jasmin Bõhmer have published "Are the FAIR Data Principles Fair?" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

This practice paper describes an ongoing research project to test the effectiveness and relevance of the FAIR Data Principles. Simultaneously, it will analyse how easy it is for data archives to adhere to the principles. The research took place from November 2016 to January 2017, and will be underpinned with feedback from the repositories.

The FAIR Data Principles feature 15 facets corresponding to the four letters of FAIR—Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. These principles have already gained traction within the research world. The European Commission has recently expanded its demand for research to produce open data. The relevant guidelines1are explicitly written in the context of the FAIR Data Principles. Given an increasing number of researchers will have exposure to the guidelines, understanding their viability and suggesting where there may be room for modification and adjustment is of vital importance.

This practice paper is connected to a dataset(Dunning et al.,2017) containing the original overview of the sample group statistics and graphs, in an Excel spreadsheet. Over the course of two months, the web-interfaces, help-pages and metadata-records of over 40 data repositories have been examined, to score the individual data repository against the FAIR principles and facets. The traffic-light rating system enables colour-coding according to compliance and vagueness. The statistical analysis provides overall, categorised, on the principles focussing, and on the facet focussing results.

The analysis includes the statistical and descriptive evaluation, followed by elaborations on Elements of the FAIR Data Principles, the subject specific or repository specific differences, and subsequently what repositories can do to improve their information architecture.

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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.

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"Data Librarianship: A Path and an Ethic. A Conversation between Thomas Padilla and Vicky Steeves"

Thomas Padilla and Vicky Steeves have published "Data Librarianship: A Path and an Ethic. A Conversation between Thomas Padilla and Vicky Steeves" in dh+lib.

I think a lot about the corporate capture of the scholarly record, and how my work in data management and reproducibility can either contribute to or disrupt that. With the rise of reproducibility as a buzzword, there are plenty of commercial entities ready to profit from so-called 'reproducibility platforms'. This represents yet another corporate capture of scholarship. I try to disrupt this by advocating for community-run, open source software for reproducibility, such as ReproZip (which I work on), o2r, and Binder. The same goes for data management platforms. We're seeing a lot of new data services springing up from major publishers and this is also something I am actively trying to combat.

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"Data Policies of Highly-Ranked Social Science Journals"

Mercè Crosas et al. have self-archived "Data Policies of Highly-Ranked Social Science Journals."

Here's an excerpt:

By encouraging and requiring that authors share their data in order to publish articles, scholarly journals have become an important actor in the movement to improve the openness of data and the reproducibility of research. But how many social science journals encourage or mandate that authors share the data supporting their research findings? How does the share of journal data policies vary by discipline? What influences these journals’ decisions to adopt such policies and instructions? And what do those policies and instructions look like?

We discuss the results of our analysis of the instructions and policies of 291 highly-ranked journals publishing social science research, where we studied the contents of journal data policies and instructions across 14 variables, such as when and how authors are asked to share their data, and what role journal ranking and age play in the existence and quality of data policies and instructions. We also compare our results to the results of other studies that have analyzed the policies of social science journals, although differences in the journals chosen and how each study defines what constitutes a data policy limit this comparison. We conclude that a little more than half of the journals in our study have data policies. A greater share of the economics journals have data policies and mandate sharing, followed by political science/international relations and psychology journals.

Finally, we use our findings to make several recommendations: Policies should include the terms "data," "dataset" or more specific terms that make it clear what to make available; policies should include the benefits of data sharing; journals, publishers, and associations need to collaborate more to clarify data policies; and policies should explicitly ask for qualitative data.

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"What Do Data Librarians Think of the MLIS? Professionals’ Perceptions of Knowledge Transfer, Trends, and Challenges"

Camille V.L. Thomas and Richard J. Urban have published "What Do Data Librarians Think of the MLIS? Professionals' Perceptions of Knowledge Transfer, Trends, and Challenges " in College & Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

There are existing studies on data curation programs in library science education and studies on data services in libraries. However, there is not much insight into how educational programs have prepared data professionals for practice. This study asked 105 practicing professionals how well they thought their education prepared them for professional experience. It also asked supervisors about their perceptions of how well employees performed. After analyzing the results, the investigators of this study found that changing the educational model may lead to improvements in future library data services.

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"Archiving Large-Scale Legacy Multimedia Research Data: A Case Study"

Claudia Yogeswaran and Kearsy Cormier have published "Archiving Large-Scale Legacy Multimedia Research Data: A Case Study " in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper we provide a case study of the creation of the DCAL Research Data Archive at University College London. In doing so, we assess the various challenges associated with archiving large-scale legacy multimedia research data, given the lack of literature on archiving such datasets. We address issues such as the anonymisation of video research data, the ethical challenges of managing legacy data and historic consent, ownership considerations, the handling of large-size multimedia data, as well as the complexity of multi-project data from a number of researchers and legacy data from eleven years of research.

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Global Access to Research Software: The Forgotten Pillar of Open Science Implementation

The Global Young Academy has released Global Access to Research Software: The Forgotten Pillar of Open Science Implementation .

Here's an excerpt:

The Global Young Academy (GYA), in collaboration with the Oxford-based organisation INASP, carried out a pilot survey to assess the quantity and quality of access to proprietary and open source software among researchers from all disciplines. . . .Emphasis was placed on gathering data from researchers based in Bangladesh, Ghana and Nigeria, whose access to and use of research software had not yet been extensively documented.

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"Data Availability, Reusability, and Analytic Reproducibility: Evaluating the Impact of a Mandatory Open Data Policy at the Journal Cognition"

Tom Hardwicke et al. have self-archived "Data Availability, Reusability, and Analytic Reproducibility: Evaluating the Impact of a Mandatory Open Data Policy at the Journal Cognition."

Here's an excerpt:

Access to research data is a critical feature of an efficient, progressive, and ultimately self-correcting scientific ecosystem. But the extent to which in-principle benefits of data sharing are realized in practice is unclear. Crucially, it is largely unknown whether published findings can be reproduced by repeating reported analyses upon shared data ("analytic reproducibility"). To investigate, we conducted an observational evaluation of a mandatory open data policy introduced at the journal Cognition. Interrupted time-series analyses indicated a substantial post-policy increase in data available statements (104/417, 25% pre-policy to 136/174, 78% post-policy), and data that were in-principle reusable (23/104, 22% pre-policy to 85/136, 62%, post-policy). However, for 35 articles with in-principle reusable data, the analytic reproducibility of target outcomes related to key findings was poor: 11 (31%) cases were reproducible without author assistance, 11 (31%) cases were reproducible only with author assistance, and 13 (37%) cases were not fully reproducible despite author assistance. Importantly, original conclusions did not appear to be seriously impacted. Mandatory open data policies can increase the frequency and quality of data sharing. However, suboptimal data curation, unclear analysis specification, and reporting errors can impede analytic reproducibility, undermining the utility of data sharing and the credibility of scientific findings.

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"The State of Assessing Data Stewardship Maturity —An Overview"

Ge Peng has published "The State of Assessing Data Stewardship Maturity —An Overview" in Data Science Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Data stewardship encompasses all activities that preserve and improve the information content, accessibility, and usability of data and metadata. Recent regulations, mandates, policies, and guidelines set forth by the U.S. government, federal other, and funding agencies, scientific societies and scholarly publishers, have levied stewardship requirements on digital scientific data. This elevated level of requirements has increased the need for a formal approach to stewardship activities that supports compliance verification and reporting. Meeting or verifying compliance with stewardship requirements requires assessing the current state, identifying gaps, and, if necessary, defining a roadmap for improvement. This, however, touches on standards and best practices in multiple knowledge domains. Therefore, data stewardship practitioners, especially these at data repositories or data service centers or associated with data stewardship programs, can benefit from knowledge of existing maturity assessment models. This article provides an overview of the current state of assessing stewardship maturity for federally funded digital scientific data. A brief description of existing maturity assessment models and related application(s) is provided. This helps stewardship practitioners to readily obtain basic information about these models. It allows them to evaluate each model’s suitability for their unique verification and improvement needs.

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Practical Challenges For Researchers in Data Sharing

Springer Nature has released Practical Challenges For Researchers in Data Sharing.

Here's an excerpt:

This survey aims to understand researcher activity around sharing data at a particular point in the research lifecycle—when they are preparing their work for publication. In this it builds on previously published studies that explore data sharing more generally during the research process. It explores attitudes briefly, but focuses on actions and challenges in sharing data. Responses from over 7,700 researchers enabled us to draw new insights across subject felds and, to a lesser extent, across geographies.

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"Data We Trust—But—What Data?"

Jennifer Golbeck has published "Data We Trust—But—What Data?" in Reference & User Services Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

In the last year, we have not seen a massive removal of government data. We have seen targeted suppression and a general lack of concern for having government data sources reflect objective truth. Fortunately, many organizations are monitoring, archiving, and analyzing changes to official data.

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