"Research Data Management in Academic Institutions: A Scoping Review"

Laure Perrier et al. have published "Research Data Management in Academic Institutions: A Scoping Review" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

Interest in research data management in the global community is on the rise. Recent activity has included the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation moving their open access/open data policy, considered to be exceptionally strong, into force at the beginning of 2017 [10]. Researchers working towards a solution to the Zika virus organized themselves to publish all epidemiological and clinical data as soon as it was gathered and analyzed [11]. Fecher and colleagues [12] conducted a systematic review focusing on data sharing to support the development of a conceptual framework, however it lacked rigorous methods, such as the use of a comprehensive search strategy [13]. Another review on data sharing was conducted by Bull and colleagues [14] that examined stakeholders' perspectives on ethical best practices but focused specifically on low- and middle-income settings. In this scoping review, we aim to assess the research literature that examines research data management as it relates to academic institutions. It is a time of increasing activity in the area of research data management [15] and higher learning institutions need to be ready to address this change, as well as provide support for their faculty and researchers. Identifying the current state of the literature so there is a clear understanding of the evidence in the area will provide guidance in planning strategies for services and support, as well as outlining essential areas for future research endeavors in research data management. The purpose of this study is to describe the volume, topics, and methodological nature of the existing research literature on research data management in academic institutions.

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"GI+100: Long Term Preservation of Digital Geographic Information—16 Fundamental Principles Agreed by National Mapping Agencies and State Archives"

Carsten Rönsdorf et al. have published "GI+100: Long Term Preservation of Digital Geographic Information—16 Fundamental Principles Agreed by National Mapping Agencies and State Archives" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper states 16 principles for the long term retention and preservation of digital geographic information. The paper is mainly aimed at public sector geographic information providers in Europe (particularly those involved in mapping and cadastre) with the intention of highlighting the significance of fundamental concepts for digital geographic data archiving. Geographic information providers include mapping agencies and archives that preserve geographic data among a wider range of digital information. A supplementary objective is that the paper may provide useful information for providers of all types of geographic information right around the world.

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"Managing Data Management: Building a RDM Service at MIT Libraries"

The 2017 e-Science Symposium has released Managing Data Management: Building a RDM Service at MIT Libraries, a video of a presentation by Christine Malinowski and Phoebe Ayers.

Here's an excerpt:

In this presentation, we will provide an overview of how the MIT Libraries DMS team works, some examples of our recent projects and consultations, our specific (but certainly generalizable) challenges of providing and expanding RDM services, and the tools that we use to meet those challenges and ensure speedy and accurate service. These include a wiki-based knowledgebase, dynamic project plans using Tableau software, a rotating on-call list, and biweekly RDM updates emails.

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"Social Science Data Repositories in Data Deluge: A Case Study at ICPSR Workflow and Practices"

Wei Jeng et al. have self-archived "Social Science Data Repositories in Data Deluge: A Case Study at ICPSR Workflow and Practices."

Here's an excerpt:

Due to the recent surge of interest in the age of the data deluge, the importance of researching data infrastructures is increasing. The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model has been widely adopted as a framework for creating and maintaining digital repositories. Considering that OAIS is a reference model that requires customization for actual practice, this study examines how the current practices in a data repository map to the OAIS environment and functional components.

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Data Curation, SPEC Kit 354

ARL has released the Data Curation, SPEC Kit 354 .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This SPEC Kit covers which data curation services are offered, who may use them, which disciplines use services most, library staffing levels, policies and workflows, and the challenges of supporting these activities.

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"Making Progress Toward Open Data: Reflections on Data Sharing at PLOS ONE"

Meg Byrne has published "Making Progress Toward Open Data: Reflections on Data Sharing at PLOS ONE" in the EveryONE Blog

Here's an excerpt:

PLOS ONE has published over 65,000 papers with a DAS in the three years since the open data policy was put in place. We were initially concerned we would not be able to consider a significant number of submissions because authors could not share data, but this did not turn out to be the case. Since the implementation of the updated policy, we estimate staff have rejected less than 0.1% of submissions due to authors’ unwillingness or inability to share data. What we have seen is a growing acceptance of data sharing and evolution of data sharing practices. For instance, there has been a steady growth in datasets available directly via public data repositories such as the NCBI databases, Figshare or Dryad. While the proportion of articles with a data availability statement linking to one of these repositories is still relatively low, at around 20% in 2016, the growth is encouraging.

Another 60% of articles include data in the main text and supplementary information. While we strongly recommend discipline-specific open repositories where they exist, we also deposit the supporting information files, figures, and tables included with every article to Figshare and give each of these its own DOI. Thus, in addition to being available via the PLOS ONE article, this content is also available through an external data repository. The remaining 20% of papers have data available upon request due to restrictions acceptable under our policy, including restrictions related to sensitive data or because the data are owned by and available from a third party.

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"The Influence of Journal Submission Guidelines on Author’s Reporting of Statistics and Use of Open Research Practices"

David Giofrè et al. have published "The Influence of Journal Submission Guidelines on Author's Reporting of Statistics and Use of Open Research Practices" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

From January 2014, Psychological Science introduced new submission guidelines that encouraged the use of effect sizes, estimation, and meta-analysis (the "new statistics"), required extra detail of methods, and offered badges for use of open science practices. We investigated the use of these practices in empirical articles published by Psychological Science and, for comparison, by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, during the period of January 2013 to December 2015. The use of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) was extremely high at all times and in both journals. In Psychological Science, the use of confidence intervals increased markedly overall, from 28% of articles in 2013 to 70% in 2015, as did the availability of open data (3 to 39%) and open materials (7 to 31%). The other journal showed smaller or much smaller changes. Our findings suggest that journal-specific submission guidelines may encourage desirable changes in authors’ practices.

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"Perseids: Experimenting with Infrastructure for Creating and Sharing Research Data in the Digital Humanities"

Bridget Almas has published "Perseids: Experimenting with Infrastructure for Creating and Sharing Research Data in the Digital Humanities" in the Data Science Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

The Perseids project provides a platform for creating, publishing, and sharing research data, in the form of textual transcriptions, annotations and analyses. An offshoot and collaborator of the Perseus Digital Library (PDL), Perseids is also an experiment in reusing and extending existing infrastructure, tools, and services. This paper discusses infrastructure in the domain of digital humanities (DH). It outlines some general approaches to facilitating data sharing in this domain, and the specific choices we made in developing Perseids to serve that goal. It concludes by identifying lessons we have learned about sustainability in the process of building Perseids, noting some critical gaps in infrastructure for the digital humanities, and suggesting some implications for the wider community.

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"Open Data, [Open] Access: Linking Data Sharing and Article Sharing in the Earth Sciences"

Samantha Teplitzky has published "Open Data, [Open] Access: Linking Data Sharing and Article Sharing in the Earth Science" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION The norms of a research community influence practice, and norms of openness and sharing can be shaped to encourage researchers who share in one aspect of their research cycle to share in another. Different sets of mandates have evolved to require that research data be made public, but not necessarily articles resulting from that collected data. In this paper, I ask to what extent publications in the Earth Sciences are more likely to be open access (in all of its definitions) when researchers open their data through the Pangaea repository. METHODS Citations from Pangaea data sets were studied to determine the level of open access for each article. RESULTS This study finds that the proportion of gold open access articles linked to the repository increased 25% from 2010 to 2015 and 75% of articles were available from multiple open sources.

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"Organizational Resilience in Data Archives: Three Case Studies in Social Science Data Archives"

Kristin R. Eschenfelder and Kalpana Shankar have published "Organizational Resilience in Data Archives: Three Case Studies in Social Science Data Archives" in the Data Science Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper, we draw upon organizational studies theories to approach the issue of sustainability from an organizational perspective, focusing specifically on the organizational histories of three social science data archives (SSDA): ICPSR, UKDA, and LIS. Using a framework of organizational resilience to understand how archives perceive crisis, respond to it, and learn from experience, this article reports on an empirical study of sustainability in these long-lived SSDAs. The study draws from archival documents and interviews to examine how sustainability can and should be conceptualized as on-going processes over time and not as a quality at a single moment.

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Open Data: The Researcher Perspective

Elsevier and the Centre for Science and Technology Studies have released Open Data: The Researcher Perspective .

Here's an excerpt:

Combining information from a bibliometric analysis, a survey and case studies, this report examines how researchers share data, the attitudes of researchers toward sharing data, and why researchers might be reticent to share data.

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"An Exploratory Sequential Mixed Methods Approach to Understanding Researchers’ Data Management Practices at UVM: Integrated Findings to Develop Research Data Services"

Elizabeth A. Berman has published "An Exploratory Sequential Mixed Methods Approach to Understanding Researchers' Data Management Practices at UVM: Integrated Findings to Develop Research Data Services" in the Journal of eScience Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

This article reports on the integrated findings of an exploratory sequential mixed methods research design aimed to understand data management behaviors and challenges of faculty at the University of Vermont (UVM) in order to develop relevant research data services. The exploratory sequential mixed methods design is characterized by an initial qualitative phase of data collection and analysis, followed by a phase of quantitative data collection and analysis, with a final phase of integration or linking of data from the two separate strands of data. A joint display was used to integrate data focused on the three primary research questions: How do faculty at UVM manage their research data, in particular how do they share and preserve data in the long-term?; What challenges or barriers do UVM faculty face in effectively managing their research data?; and What institutional data management support or services are UVM faculty interested in?

See also: "An Exploratory Sequential Mixed Methods Approach to Understanding Researchers' Data Management Practices at UVM: Findings from the Qualitative Phase" and "An Exploratory Sequential Mixed Methods Approach to Understanding Researchers' Data Management Practices at UVM: Findings from the Quantitative Phase."

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LEARN Toolkit of Best Practice for Research Data Management

LEARN has released the LEARN Toolkit of Best Practice for Research Data Management.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

For research performing organisations, this deluge of data presents many challenges in areas such as policy and skills development, training, costs and governance. To help address these issues, today LEARN is publishing the final draft of its Toolkit of Best Practice for Research Data Management.

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A Tour of the Research Data Management (RDM) Service Space. The Realities of Research Data Management, Part 1

OCLC Research has released A Tour of the Research Data Management (RDM) Service Space. The Realities of Research Data Management, Part 1.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Realities of Research Data Management is a four-part series that explores how research universities are addressing the challenge of managing research data throughout the research lifecycle.

In this introductory report, we provide some brief background on the emergence of RDM as a focus for research support services within higher education, and present a simple framework describing three major components of the RDM service space:

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"On the Reuse of Scientific Data"

Irene V. Pasquetto, Bernadette M. Randles, and Christine L. Borgman have published "On the Reuse of Scientific Data" in Data Science Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Data sharing practices, especially motivations and incentives, have received far more study than has data reuse, perhaps because of the array of contested concepts on which reuse rests and the disparate contexts in which it occurs. Here we explicate concepts of data, sharing, and open data as a means to examine data reuse. We explore distinctions between use and reuse of data. Lastly we propose six research questions on data reuse worthy of pursuit by the community: How can uses of data be distinguished from reuses? When is reproducibility an essential goal? When is data integration an essential goal? What are the tradeoffs between collecting new data and reusing existing data? How do motivations for data collection influence the ability to reuse data? How do standards and formats for data release influence reuse opportunities? We conclude by summarizing the implications of these questions for science policy and for investments in data reuse.

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"Practices of Research Data Curation in Institutional Repositories: A Qualitative View from Repository Staff"

Dong Joon Lee and Besiki Stvilia have published "Practices of Research Data Curation in Institutional Repositories: A Qualitative View from Repository Staff" in PLOS ONE.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The importance of managing research data has been emphasized by the government, funding agencies, and scholarly communities. Increased access to research data increases the impact and efficiency of scientific activities and funding. Thus, many research institutions have established or plan to establish research data curation services as part of their Institutional Repositories (IRs). However, in order to design effective research data curation services in IRs, and to build active research data providers and user communities around those IRs, it is essential to study current data curation practices and provide rich descriptions of the sociotechnical factors and relationships shaping those practices. Based on 13 interviews with 15 IR staff members from 13 large research universities in the United States, this paper provides a rich, qualitative description of research data curation and use practices in IRs. In particular, the paper identifies data curation and use activities in IRs, as well as their structures, roles played, skills needed, contradictions and problems present, solutions sought, and workarounds applied.

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A Snapshot of Open Data and Open Science Policies in Europe

SPARC Europe and the DCC have released A Snapshot of Open Data and Open Science Policies in Europe.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This report is the first in a series that will seek to shed light on similarities and differences in Open Data and Open Science policies between European nations, and to assess their effectiveness in opening research data.

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"The Landscape of Research Data Repositories in 2015: A re3data Analysis"

Maxi Kindling et al. have published "The Landscape of Research Data Repositories in 2015: A re3data Analysis" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

This article provides a comprehensive descriptive and statistical analysis of metadata information on 1,381 research data repositories worldwide and across all research disciplines. The analyzed metadata is derived from the re3data database, enabling search and browse functionalities for the global registry of research data repositories. The analysis focuses mainly on institutions that operate research data repositories, types and subjects of research data repositories (RDR), access conditions as well as services provided by the research data repositories. RDR differ in terms of the service levels they offer, languages they support or standards they comply with. These statements are commonly acknowledged by saying the RDR landscape is heterogeneous. As expected, we found a heterogeneous RDR landscape that is mostly influenced by the repositories' disciplinary background for which they offer services.

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"Data Science Programs in U.S. Higher Education: An Interview with the Authors"

Rong Tang and Watinee Sae-Lim are featured in "Data Science Programs in U.S. Higher Education: An Interview with the Authors," a video article, in the Journal of eScience Librarianship. A transcript of the interview is also available.

Here's an excerpt:

Their exploratory content analysis of 30 randomly selected Data Science (DS) programs from eight disciplines revealed significant gaps in current DS education in the United States. These findings have implications for improving DS education in iSchools and across other disciplines.

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"Data Curation Network: How Do We Compare? A Snapshot of Six Academic Library Institutions’ Data Repository and Curation Services"

Lisa R. Johnston et al. have published "Data Curation Network: How Do We Compare? A Snapshot of Six Academic Library Institutions’ Data Repository and Curation Services" in the Journal of eScience Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

Methods: Each institutional lead provided a written summary of their services based on a previously developed structure, followed by group discussion and refinement of descriptions. Service areas assessed include the repository services for data, technologies used, policies, and staffing in place.

Conclusions: Through this process we aim to better define the current levels of support offered by our institutions as a first step toward meeting our project's overarching goal to develop a shared staffing model for data curation across multiple institutions.

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"A Pilot Competency Matrix for Data Management Skills: A Step toward the Development of Systematic Data Information Literacy Programs"

Megan R. Sapp Nelson has published "A Pilot Competency Matrix for Data Management Skills: A Step toward the Development of Systematic Data Information Literacy Programs" in the Journal of eScience Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

This article describes a significant innovation upon existing competencies by identifying a scaffolding (built upon existing competencies) that moves students progressively from undergraduate training through post graduate coursework and research to post-doctoral work and into the early years of data stewardship. The scaffolding ties together existing research that has been completed in research data management skills and data information literacy with research into the outcomes that are desirable for individuals to present in data management at each of the levels of education. Competencies are aligned according to application (personal, team, research enterprise) in such a way that the skills attained at the undergraduate level give students moving on to graduate work greater familiarity with data management and therefore greater likelihood of success at the graduate and then post graduate and data steward levels.

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"Building a Research Data Management Service at the University of California, Berkeley"

Jamie Wittenberg and Mary Elings have self-archived "Building a Research Data Management Service at the University of California, Berkeley."

Here's an excerpt:

University of California, Berkeley's Library and the central Research Information Technologies unit have collaborated to develop a research data management program that leverages each organization’s expertise and resources to create a unified service. The service offers a range of workshops, consultation, and an online resource. Because of this collaboration, service areas that are often fully embedded in IT, like backup and secure storage, as well as services in the Library domain, like resource discovery and instruction, are integrated into a single research data management program..

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"Research Data Services in European Academic Research Libraries"

Carol Tenopir et al. have published "Research Data Services in European Academic Research Libraries" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

Research data is an essential part of the scholarly record, and management of research data is increasingly seen as an important role for academic libraries. This article presents the results of a survey of directors of the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER) academic member libraries to discover what types of research data services (RDS) are being offered by European academic research libraries and what services are planned for the future. Overall, the survey found that library directors strongly agree on the importance of RDS. As was found in earlier studies of academic libraries in North America, more European libraries are currently offering or are planning to offer consultative or reference RDS than technical or hands-on RDS. The majority of libraries provide support for training in skills related to RDS for their staff members. Almost all libraries collaborate with other organizations inside their institutions or with outside institutions in order to offer or develop policy related to RDS. We discuss the implications of the current state of RDS in European academic research libraries, and offer directions for future research.

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"Fostering Effective Data Management Practices at Leiden University"

Peter Verhaar have published "Fostering Effective Data Management Practices at Leiden University" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

To actively promote the stewardship of all the research data that are produced at Leiden University, a comprehensive, institution-wide programme was launched in 2015, which centrally aims to encourage its researchers to carefully plan the temporal storage, long-term preservation and potential reuse of their data. This programme, which is managed centrally by the Department of Academic Affairs, and which receives important contributions from academic staff, from Leiden University Libraries, and from the University’s central ICT organisation, basically consists of three parts. Firstly, a basic central policy has been formulated, containing clear guidelines for activities before, during and after research projects. . . . As a second part of the data management programme, faculties have organised workshops and meetings, concentrating on the rationale and on the technical and organisational practicalities of effective data management in order to bring about a discipline-specific protocol. . . . Thirdly, to ensure that scholars can genuinely make a reasoned selection among the many tools that are currently available, a central catalogue was developed which lists and characterises the most relevant data management services.

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"Updating the Agenda for Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communications"

Clifford Lynch has published "Updating the Agenda for Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communications" in College & Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

This issue of C&RL is focused on scholarly communication, and it seems appropriate, in this invited guest editorial, to step back and examine the broader agenda that academic and research libraries need to consider today in engaging with scholarly communications as a way of framing the issue. My view is that this agenda is ripe for re-thinking. The overall environment has changed significantly in the last few years, underscoring the growing irrelevance of some long-held ideas, and at the same time, clearly identifying new and urgent priorities. What I hope to do here is to summarize very succinctly my thoughts on the most pressing issues and the areas most needing reconsideration. Articles in this issue touch upon aspects of many of these topics; I hope that future authors may also find topical inspirations here.

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