Digital Curation & Digital Preservation

"Reference Rot in the Digital Humanities Literature: An Analysis of Citations Containing Website Links in DHQ"

Link rot is likely most familiar in the form of "404 Not Found" error messages, but there are other less prominent obstacles to accessing web content. Our study examines instances of link rot in Digital Humanities Quarterly articles and its impact on the ability to access the online content referenced in these articles after their publication. . . .

Our data shows that a significant number of works cited no longer exist, are inaccessible, or have additional barriers to access. Instances of link rot increase with time. Additionally, there is a higher frequency and higher proportion of links contained in DHQ articles, showing that internet resources are a critical part of the DH literature. Taken together, the combined result is a persistent and cumulative threat to the integrity and stability of the DH literature, and one that is even more alarming when compared to other disciplines.

https://bit.ly/42iZq3t

"Integrating Preservation into Librarian Workflows"

The core mission of libraries is to ensure perpetual access to the record of knowledge. As a review of the NASIG webinar (formerly North American Serials Interest Group), "Integrating Preservation into Librarian Workflows," by Jill Emery and Sunshine Carter, this article examines working models constructed to sustain perpetual access for their institutional communities. In reflecting on these data-intensive practices, both presenters now recognize that previously impactful collection development business decisions were being made in the dark. Reviewing the webinar also reveals that this issue of preservation access has two critically distinct aspects, which should not be conflated as interchangeable. One is concerned with long-term preservation and the other addresses a library’s ability to provide post-cancellation access to its user community, given budgetary or physical space constraints. The following is an analysis of how effective the processes explored in the webinar are in addressing both post-cancellation access and long-term perpetual access goals. Based on a 2018 NASIG survey, results indicated that many organizations in scholarly communications lacked preservation policies. In June 2022, as a result of the survey, NASIG released the model digital preservation policy as a template to guide consequential and explicit decision-making by addressing issues including scope, roles, responsibilities, tools and techniques. These policy issues are important for librarians to understand before negotiating content licenses, in sustaining long-term discovery and access, and when developing collaborative access frameworks to address collection development and maintenance challenges.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.614

WorldFAIR Project (D13.2) Cultural Heritage Image Sharing Recommendations Report

Deliverable 13.2 aims to build on our understanding of what it means to support FAIR in the sharing of image data derived from GLAM collections. This report looks at previous efforts by the sector towards FAIR alignment and presents 5 recommendations designed to be implemented and tested at the DRI that are also broadly applicable to the work of the GLAMs. The recommendations are ultimately a roadmap for the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) to follow in improving repository services, as well as a call for continued dialogue around "what is FAIR?" within the cultural heritage research data landscape.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7897243

"Rethinking Transparency and Rigor from a Qualitative Open Science Perspective"

To further complicate matters, many qualitative researchers would posit that while secondary data are a combination of the researcher’s perceptions and observations, even primary data, such as interview transcripts, are filtered to some extent through the researcher. This is because, in qualitative research, the researcher is an instrument of both data collection and analysis . . . .

The researcher-as-instrument tradition also complicates discussions around reproducibility (i.e., the ability for another researcher to look at someone’s data and reproduce the analyses), one of the key components of rigor as it is currently discussed in the open science movement (NIH, n.d.). Quantitative researchers’ focus on reproducibility is often contrary to the tenets of qualitative research, particularly in methodologies aiming to uncover new ways of knowing, such as constructivist and grounded theory approaches. If one understands the researcher as a data collection instrument and a filter through which data is processed, strict quantitative-focused reproducibility becomes less likely—not through misconduct or error, but because ultimately, people conduct research, and people are not likely to have exactly the same perspectives. Guidelines that reinforce reproducibility without addressing this tension are not going to be useful for all researchers.

https://bit.ly/3MEbtnk

"A Pilot Study to Locate Historic Scientific Data in a University Archive"

Historic data in analog (or print) format is a valuable resource that is utilized by scientists in many fields. This type of data may be found in various locations on university campuses including offices, labs, storage facilities, and archives. This study investigates whether biological data held in one institutional university archives could be identified, described, and thus made potentially useful for contemporary life scientists. Scientific data was located and approximately half of it was deemed to be of some value to current researchers and about 20% included enough information for the study to be repeated. Locating individual data sets in the collections at the University Archives at the University of Minnesota proved challenging. This preliminary work points to possible ways to move forward to make raw data in university archives collections more discoverable and likely to be reused. It raises questions that can help inform future work in this area.

https://bit.ly/41JBMNb

"Initial Insight Into Three Modes of Data Sharing: Prevalence of Primary Reuse, Data Integration and Dataset Release in Research Articles"

While data sharing has received research interest in recent times, its real status remains unclear, owing to its ambiguous concept. To understand the current status of data sharing, this study examined primary reuse, data integration, and dataset release as the actual practices of data sharing. A total of 963 articles, chosen from those published in 2018 and registered in the Web of Science global citation database, were manually checked. Existing data were reused in the mode of data integration (13.3%) as frequently as they were for the mode of primary reuse (12.1%). Dataset release was the least common mode (9.0%). The results show the variation in data sharing and indicate the need for standardization of data description in articles based on thorough registration and expansion in public data archives to close the loop that results in the virtuous cycle of research data.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1546

"’We Share All Data with Each Other’: Data-Sharing in Peer-to-Peer Relationships"

The analysis identifies three social forms of data-sharing in peer-to-peer relationships: (a) closed communal sharing, which is based on a feeling of belonging together; (b) closed associative sharing, in which the participants act on the basis of an agreement; and (c) open associative sharing, which is oriented to “institutional imperatives” (Merton) and to formal regulations. The study shows that far more data-sharing is occurring in scientific practice than seems to be apparent from a concept of open data alone.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-023-09487-y

FADGI: Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials, Third Edition

The Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials: Third Edition (linked below) were developed by the Still Image Working Group in 2022-2023. This document is an update of the 2016 Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials: Creation of Raster Image Master Files. The latest revision of the guidelines expands on earlier works and incorporates new material reflecting the advances in imaging science and cultural heritage imaging best practice. The Guidelines include shared best practices for still image materials (e.g., textual content, maps, and photographic prints and negatives) followed by agencies participating in the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI).These guidelines are intended to be used in conjunction with digital image conformance evaluation targets and software. Together, these guidelines and appropriate testing and monitoring systems provide the foundation for a FADGI-conforming digitization program.

https://bit.ly/3Bn6hOm

Open Science: A Practical Guide for Early-Career Researchers

Beginning researchers are an important link in the transition to Open Science, so this guide is aimed at PhD candidates, Research Master Students, and early-career researchers from all disciplines at Dutch universities and research institutes. [This guide will be very useful to non-Dutch researchers.] It is designed to accompany researchers in every step of their research, from the phase of preparing your research project and discovering relevant resources (chapter 2) to the phase of data collection and analysis (chapter 3), writing and publishing articles, data, and other research output (chapter 4), and outreach and assessment (chapter 5). Every chapter provides you with the best tools and practices to implement immediately.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7716152

Digital Scholarship Has Released Digital Curation Certificate and Master’s Degree Programs

Digital Scholarship has released Digital Curation Certificate and Master’s Degree Programs. This document describes digital curation certificate and master’s degree programs in North America, identifying those that are online. It does not cover individualized certificate programs, such as those at Indiana University Bloomington or the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Nor does it cover digital curation specializations within MLS and other master’s degree programs in iSchools. It is available as a website and a website PDF with live links.

"How and Why Do Researchers Reference Data? A Study of Rhetorical Features and Functions of Data References in Academic Articles"

Data reuse is a common practice in the social sciences. While published data play an essential role in the production of social science research, they are not consistently cited, which makes it difficult to assess their full scholarly impact and give credit to the original data producers. Furthermore, it can be challenging to understand researchers’ motivations for referencing data. Like references to academic literature, data references perform various rhetorical functions, such as paying homage, signaling disagreement, or drawing comparisons. This paper studies how and why researchers reference social science data in their academic writing. We develop a typology to model relationships between the entities that anchor data references, along with their features (access, actions, locations, styles, types) and functions (critique, describe, illustrate, interact, legitimize). We illustrate the use of the typology by coding multidisciplinary research articles (n = 30) referencing social science data archived at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). We show how our typology captures researchers’ interactions with data and purposes for referencing data. Our typology provides a systematic way to document and analyze researchers’ narratives about data use, extending our ability to give credit to data that support research.

https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2023-010

Good, Better, Best: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs

Good, Better, Best: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs brings together the project’s growing knowledge and understanding around this community of practice, as well as reports on the Work Package’s research and development over the course of the project.

Following an introduction chapter giving a brief background landscape summary alongside employed methodologies, Chapter 2, "A basic guidebook for the small and scholar-led press" considers good, better, and best practices around file formats, metadata, content packaging, existing routes to digital publication archives, archiving and preservation workflows, and challenges surrounding copyright, reuse, and licensing. Additional chapters detail the repository workflow experimentations, both manual and automated, as well as successful proof-of-concept archiving in two online repositories: one, and institutional repository, and the other, the Internet Archive. Along with a chapter (Chapter 6) that explores the current understanding around implications for archiving and preserving complex and experimental monographs, two further chapters (7 and 8) look at future work: the expansion and development of the Thoth Archiving Network and the new Open Book Futures project, beginning May 2023. Appendices include signposting to toolkits, guides, and resources, as well as a brief glossary that provides links to more comprehensive archiving and preservation glossaries already in existence. We hope this will be a useful resource for the small and scholar-led press community and beyond.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7876047

Common Scholarly Communication Infrastructure Landscape Review

Scholarly communication is a complicated sector, with numerous participants and multiple mechanisms for communicating and reviewing materials created in an increasing variety of formats by researchers across the globe.[1] In turn, the researcher who seeks to use the products of this system wishes to discover, access, and use relevant and trustworthy materials as effortlessly as possible. The work of driving efficiency into this complex sector while bringing its multiple strands together seamlessly for the reader (or, increasingly, for a computational user) rests on a foundation of infrastructure, much of it shared across multiple publishers. In this landscape review, we seek to provide a high-level overview of the shared infrastructure that supports scholarly communication.

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.318775

"Data Sharing in the Context of Community-Engaged Research Partnerships"

Over the past 20 years, the National Institutes for Health (NIH) has implemented several policies designed to improve sharing of research data, such as the NIH public access policy for publications, NIH genomic data sharing policy, and National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Moonshot public access and data sharing policy. . . . Important questions that we must consider as data sharing is expanded are to whom do benefits of data sharing accrue and to whom do benefits not accrue? In an era of growing efforts to engage diverse communities in research, we must consider the impact of data sharing for all research participants and the communities that they represent.

We examine the issue of data sharing through a community-engaged research lens, informed by a long-standing partnership between community-engaged researchers and a key community health organization (Kruse et al., 2022). We contend that without effective community engagement and rich contextual knowledge, biases resulting from data sharing can remain unchecked. We provide several recommendations that would allow better community engagement related to data sharing to ensure both community and researcher understanding of the issues involved and move toward shared benefits. By identifying good models for evaluating the impact of data sharing on communities that contribute data, and then using those models systematically, we will advance the consideration of the community perspective and increase the likelihood of benefits for all.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115895

"Estimating Social Bias in Data Sharing Behaviours: An Open Science Experiment"

Open data sharing is critical for scientific progress. Yet, many authors refrain from sharing scientific data, even when they have promised to do so. Through a preregistered, randomized audit experiment (N = 1,634), we tested possible ethnic, gender and status-related bias in scientists’ data-sharing willingness. 814 (54%) authors of papers where data were indicated to be ‘available upon request’ responded to our data requests, and 226 (14%) either shared or indicated willingness to share all or some data. While our preregistered hypotheses regarding bias in data-sharing willingness were not confirmed, we observed systematically lower response rates for data requests made by putatively Chinese treatments compared to putatively Anglo-Saxon treatments. Further analysis indicated a theoretically plausible heterogeneity in the causal effect of ethnicity on data-sharing. In interaction analyses, we found indications of lower responsiveness and data-sharing willingness towards male but not female data requestors with Chinese names. These disparities, which likely arise from stereotypic beliefs about male Chinese requestors’ trustworthiness and deservingness, impede scientific progress by preventing the free circulation of knowledge.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02129-8

Paywall: "We Need a Plan D"

Researchers, institutions and funders should collaborate to develop an overarching strategy for data preservation — a plan D. There will doubtless be calls for a ‘PubMed Central for data’. But what we really need is a federated system of repositories with functionality tailored to the information that they archive. This will require domain experts to agree standards for different types of data from different fields: what should be archived and when, which format, where, and for how long.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-023-01817-y

"Continuity and Discontinuity in Web Archives"

Web archival materials are not direct traces of the web, they are direct traces of crawlers. By design, the structure of web archives limits our collective capacity to explore the memory of the Web. These structural issues induce temporal discontinuities in the archives such as inconsistency, redundancy and blindness. In this paper, we address the question of re-injecting continuity within large corpora of web archives. We thus introduce the notions of persistences (series of time-stable snapshots of archived web pages) and continuity spaces (networks of time-consistent persistences). We demonstrate how { on the basis of a quality score { persistences can be used to select subsets of web archives within which in-depth historical analysis can be conducted at scale. We next propose to make use of a new visualization approach called the web cernes to graphically reconstruct the multi-level evolution of an archived web site. We finally apply our framework to study the archives of the firsttuesday movement: a constellation of networking web sites that acted in the interest of the economical growth of the web in the early 2000’s.

https://hal.science/hal-04057507

"Science Journals Integrate Dryad to Simplify Data Deposition and Strengthen Scientific Reproducibility"

The Science family journals have announced a partnership with the nonprofit data repository Dryad that simplifies the process by which authors deposit data underlying new work — a critical step to facilitating data’s routine reuse. The partnership is yet another step taken by the Science journals to ensure data the scientific community requires to verify, replicate and reanalyze new research is openly available. . . .

Because the partnership with Dryad integrates Dryad’s platform with the Science family journal’s submission process, authors will have the option to deposit data at Dryad directly from the submission site of any Science family journal. As authors submit research to the journals, they will be prompted about data availability and welcome to deposit their data to any suitable disciplinary repository. But, if data do not yet have a home, authors will have the opportunity to upload their data to Dryad. . . .

To ensure that this service is widely available, the Science journals will cover costs of Dryad data publication for accepted papers.

http://bit.ly/43wtVoD

"Guest Post — Why Interoperability Matters for Open Research — And More Than Ever"

The question remains, why have we not achieved more in delivering connectivity across the research system? While funding for this kind of underpinning infrastructure is notable in its absence (or where it is available it is often too temporary in nature), the other major challenge is in securing adoption among the service providers (funders, publishers, and institutions among the key players) that would maximize the use and potential of building those connections. It is notoriously hard for organisations to tweak or adapt existing workflows and legacy systems and to demonstrate the benefits (and hence prioritise the work) at an individual organisation level that may seem obvious at a system level.

https://cutt.ly/K7hxFQz

"Know(ing) Infrastructure: The Wayback Machine as Object and Instrument of Digital Research"

From documenting human rights abuses to studying online advertising, web archives are increasingly positioned as critical resources for a broad range of scholarly Internet research agendas. In this article, we reflect on the motivations and methodological challenges of investigating the world’s largest web archive, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (IAWM). Using a mixed methods approach, we report on a pilot project centred around documenting the inner workings of ‘Save Page Now’ (SPN) — an Internet Archive tool that allows users to initiate the creation and storage of ‘snapshots’ of web resources. By improving our understanding of SPN and its role in shaping the IAWM, this work examines how the public tool is being used to ‘save the Web’ and highlights the challenges of operationalising a study of the dynamic sociotechnical processes supporting this knowledge infrastructure. Inspired by existing Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches, the paper charts our development of methodological interventions to support an interdisciplinary investigation of SPN, including: ethnographic methods, ‘experimental blackbox tactics’, data tracing, modelling and documentary research. We discuss the opportunities and limitations of our methodology when interfacing with issues associated with temporality, scale and visibility, as well as critically engage with our own positionality in the research process (in terms of expertise and access). We conclude with reflections on the implications of digital STS approaches for ‘knowing infrastructure’, where the use of these infrastructures is unavoidably intertwined with our ability to study the situated and material arrangements of their creation.

https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231164759

Digital Scholarship Releases New PDF Versions of Its Bibliographies

This spring, Digital Scholarship’s bibliographies in the HTML format were reformatted as single page files with internal navigation. This included all bibliographies that were in HTML format only as well as the HTML versions of paperback books. These new PDFs are in a 12 point font and are designed for printing; however, they also have live links for immediate access. There were no content changes. For a list of all Digital Scholarship publications, see the site map.

Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, v. 3

Altmetrics Bibliography

Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography, v. 2

Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works

Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement

Digital Curation Resource Guide

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography, v.7

E-science and Academic Libraries Bibliography

Google Books Bibliography, v. 7

Institutional Repository Bibliography, v. 4

Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals

Open Access Journals Bibliography

Open Access Webliography

Research Data Curation Bibliography, v. 10

Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography

Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, v. 80

Transforming Peer Review Bibliography

Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography

"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

"Interoperable Infrastructure for Software and Data Publishing"

Achieving scalable, high-quality, interoperable data and software publishing is possible. There are already builders, some represented by the authorship of this article, that are on the right path, building tools that effectively meet the needs of researchers in an open and pluggable way. One example is InvenioRDM, a flexible and turn-key next-generation research data management repository built by CERN and more than 25 multi-disciplinary partners world-wide; InvenioRDM leverages community standards and supports FAIR practices out of the box. Another example of agnostic, pluggable tooling, in this case for software submission, are the submission workflow tools currently developed in the HERMES project. These allow researchers to automate the publication of software artifacts together with rich metadata, to create software publications following the FAIR Principles for Research Software.

http://bit.ly/42Lc5Oe

"The Continued Problem of URL Decay: An Updated Analysis of Health Care Management Journal Citations"

Objective: This study updates a 2009 study which examined uniform resource locator (URL) decay in health care management journals and seeks to determine whether continued URL availability relates to publication date, resource type, or top-level domain. The authors also provide an analysis of differences in findings between the two study periods.

Methods: The authors collected the URLs of web-based resources cited in articles published in five health care management source journals from 2016 to 2018. The URLs were checked to see if they were still active and then analyzed to determine if continued availability was related to publication date, resource type, or top-level domain.

Results: There were statistically significant differences in URL availability across publication date, resource type, and top-level domain. Domains with the highest rate of decay were .com and .net and the lowest rate were .edu and .gov. As expected, the older the citation, the higher the rate of decay. The overall rate of URL decay decreased from 49.3% to 36.1% between studies.

Conclusion: URL decay in health care management journals has decreased in the last 15 years. Still, URL decay does continue to be a problem. Interestingly, health services policy research journals had a lower rate of decay than practitioner-oriented journals (34.8% vs. 51.7%). Authors, publishers, and librarians should continue to promote the use of digital object identifiers and web archiving and perhaps study and replicate efforts used by health services policy research journals to increase continued URL availability rates.

https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2022.1456

"Springer Nature Makes Data Sharing Easier with Single Data Policy across All Journals and Books"

Springer Nature has taken a further step forwards in its commitment to open science by requiring mandatory data availability statements (DAS) across its journals portfolio, and introducing its first unified data policy across the books portfolio.

Despite researchers’ support for open data sharing, less than 40% of authors actively make their data available. Researchers tell us this can be down to practical challenges, including a lack of clarity about what is required. Increasingly, governments, funders and research institutes are adopting data sharing requirements in their policies. Encouraging data sharing across all publishing formats recognises this growing need for clearer, more accessible, actionable and measurable data policies. As a longstanding supporter of Open Research, Springer Nature is Introducing DAS as standard for its journal portfolio to promote greater transparency and reproducibility. Adopting a unified policy for books for the first time, is a further exciting step towards encouraging open research practices across all publications and driving forward open science for all.

http://bit.ly/3FNihv9