Data centres: their use, value and impact

This report provides an analysis of the usage and impact of a number of research data centres, representing a cross-section of research disciplines in the UK.

The study aimed to demonstrate the importance, relevance and benefits of effective sharing and curation of research data for the UK research community. It looked at the long-term usage and impact of data curated by a cross-disciplinary selection of established data centres.

Using quantitative and qualitative approaches, the study gathered evidence on the extent data centres have been useful to the research community. As part of a wider body of work, this evidence will help to build a case for improving data sharing practice in the UK.

The full report is available at the RIN website or here.

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Guide: How to Cite Datasets and Link to Publications

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) has published another in its series of How- to Guides: ‘How to Cite Datasets and Link to Publications‘ by Alex Ball and Monica Duke of the DCC. It explains how researchers can create links between their publications and the underlying data, so that each can be found from the other.

It also provides advice for repository managers and data archivists wishing to make their data holdings easier to cite.

The guide is available here.

Mantra Project launches online training courses for RDM

The MANTRA project has just pubished an online training course to help disseminate good practise in research data management at the University of Edinburgh and beyond.

The online training course provides guidelines for the management of research data focussing on key concepts of data management. In addition practical exercices in handling data which learners can download and work trough at their own place are provided.

The Data Library team at EDINA produced the materials over the course of the past year as part of the JISC Managing Research Data programme.

Report: Legal Status of Research Data in four european countries

It is difficult for researchers and those supporting them to understand how open access to research data can be legally obtained and re-used. This is due to the fact that European and national laws vary and researchers work across national boundaries.

A possible approach to providing clarity would be that researchers assign a licence to their data. This practice could be incorporated in a code of conduct for researchers.
The report ‘The legal status of research data in the Knowledge Exchange partner countries’ was commissioned by Knowledge Exchange (KE) and written by the Centre for Intellectual Property Law (CIER). The aim of the report was to provide clarity by analysing the intellectual property regimes in the four KE countries and European database law.

Moreover, the report provides three recommendations to achieve better access: making contractual arrangements with authors, harmonisation of European copyright law and setting up of policies on commercial interests.

You’ll find the full report here. The the four national reports are available here.

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Project “Open Data and Publications” completed

The Project had the intention to support researchers to link their datasets to their corresponding publications. The library of Tilburg University want to use the experience gained by this project to offer a standard service for researchers.
In the course of the project sixty datasets were accessed and linked to publications.

To store the data, the project chose Dataverse; because dataverse offers institutions, research groups and individual researchers a simple way of archiving data and providing access to others.

For supporting the researchers procedures and guidelines were developed.

An (at least for me) surprising lesson learned by the project was that researches in fact want to make their supplementary research material available – if they are supported by library stuff. ODE stated, that it is an important task for libraries to describe and upload the materials to make it possible that datasets are linked to their publications and can be accessed by others.

As a consequence, a designated contact person for researchers and support should be nominated at Tillburg.

A useful (and maybe the only possible) way for linking data to publications – or just another difficult task for libraries to support unwilling researchers for providing at least a little of their data?

What do you think?

Reference Book “Research Data Management” published

In the course of Frankfurt Book Fair, a new reference book for reasearch data managenent was announced.

The reference book,  published by Prof. Büttner, Prof. Hobohm (both FH Potsdam) and Lars Müller, gains insights in the management of research data in different scientific communities.

Beside other topics the reference book deals with the lifecycle of research data, data policies, judical subjects, metadata and standards, repositories for research data, digital preservation and the  publishing of data.

The refence book is published by Bock and Herchen and additionally is available as open acess publication.

You can download the reference book here.

Drivers and barriers in data sharing [Update]

The ODE project has published a collection of success stories and lessons learned in the area of data sharing, re-use and preservation.

Ten stories have been selected from a series of interviewed carried out to establish a baseline for the drivers and barriers in data exchange.

You will find the full report here.

Update 25-10-2011:
Another report of the ODE project (“Integration of Data and Publications“) is related to the scientific communication and shows actual trends – e.g. it describes how libraries and publishers are dealing with research data and how they make them accessible.

One example: the report lists five abstract researcher requirements for integrating data and publication:

1. Researchers need somewhere to put data and make it safe for reuse
2. Researchers need to control its sharing and access
3. Researchers need the ability to integrate data and publication
4. Researchers need to get credit for data as a first class research object
5. Researchers need someone to pay for the costs of data availability and re-use

Quite interesting findings for our EDaWaX-Project- especially requirement 3 is a goal of our project…

An executive summary of the ODE-report is available here.

Image Source: Opportunities for Data Exchange – Project (ODE). Cover of the report: “Ten Tales of Drivers and Barriers in Data Sharing. Alliance for Permanent Access (APA). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/